


Splendid

by Lunch_Milk



Category: South Park
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-06
Updated: 2016-11-11
Packaged: 2018-08-29 11:55:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 33,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8488450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lunch_Milk/pseuds/Lunch_Milk
Summary: About halfway through his fifth grade year, Craig realizes that there are good things and bad things. He has trouble placing Kenny in one of those categories. Crenny. Originally posted on Fanfiction.net.





	1. Chapter 1

_Craig_

_“All my life my heart yearned for a thing I cannot name.” –Andre Breton_

…

About halfway through his fifth grade year, Craig realizes that there are good things in this world and then there are bad things. Craig always finds himself placing all the people and objects around him in one of those categories. South Park is bad, the planet is even worse. He can barely find anything other than Red Racer and Stripe to put in the good category. Nothing has ever been able to meet the middle.

…

Clyde kisses Bebe, or maybe Bebe kisses Clyde- either way he tells Craig all about it during lunch. It’s the new fifth grade fad; kissing. It’s not something you want; it’s something you _need_. Guys aren’t cool if they don’t kiss, if they don’t get rid of their first-kiss-virginity. They’d be called pussies because everyone would assume they’re afraid of cooties. Cooties are now immature. Craig figures it’s most likely the same for girls.

Clyde takes a bite of his sandwich and says, “Everybody’s doing it. Especially Kenny.” Craig’s eyebrows rise, Clyde nods. “Yeah, I swear. He’s probably kissed every girl in the fifth grade.”

“Even Bebe?”

Clyde’s eyes widen; he stops chewing. Token chuckles.

That day, Red kisses Kenny, but it doesn’t count because Kenny kisses everyone. So she kisses Craig at recess. The lip on lip contact makes her blush but he doesn’t. His friends congratulate him on losing his first-kiss-virginity, but he doesn’t feel any pride and they don’t call it first-kiss-virginity; they don’t know what virginity is yet. Instead, Craig licks his lips and tastes something he doesn’t like.

Craig thinks kissing is a bad thing.

…

In class, no one listens; no one raises his or her hand to answer questions except Wendy, who is an overachiever. Craig waits for the next South Park catastrophe he can miss out on, or at least try to. Sometimes, he gets caught up in the stereotypical town drama and that’s the worst feeling: the feeling of being stuck in a spider’s web.

Other times, he has to team up with Kenny, the infamous female kisser, to finish class projects. That was primarily the entire school year, total wastes of time, class projects. The subject always varied, as it should. One project was about Abraham Lincoln, another was focused on American Revolution; whatever it was, Kenny never slacked on it which was sort of surprising. Craig notices his nice handwriting, the way he slouches when he works.

He never said too much, never said enough. The hood enveloping his mouth was more like a veil hiding lips and words too sacred or possibly too vulgar for a fifth grader. Craig didn’t want to know what it could’ve been. He didn’t want to know about Kenny. He didn’t need to. Kenny was poor and quietly perverted. He knew enough.

But when Kenny looks at him, blue eyes staring deep into Craig’s, it changes his mind but only for a fleeting instant.

“What?”

The next fleeting instant is Craig scrambling for the glue stick in the blonde’s hand, a quick aversion of the eyes, and the slightest tinge of embarrassment Craig could have ever felt. He didn’t feel it much because he’s only a fifth grader and fifth graders don’t know what fleeting instants are but in the stern of his mind it’s still there.

The next instant is unremarkable for the both of them and deserves a middle finger to the face. “Nothing.”

(Craig realizes that fleeting instants are bad things too)

…

When you’re a fifth grader at recess, you don’t do much. The younger kids run around and enjoy life, but you, being the fifth grader you are, just sit. You engage in pointless conversation with others sitting around you. Sometimes you walk around the playground and engage in pointless conversation. Sometimes you play kickball because that’s just about the only recess game fifth graders play. As for Craig, he watches.

There’s Stan, Cartman and Kyle feuding over whatever preposterous bullshit they feud about, and a blob of mud streaked orange otherwise known as Kenny are all residing on the playground’s jungle gym. Craig wonders how the fat one got to the top, and how he’s going to get down. The blonde one kicks his legs into the air beneath him, barely speaks a word. It’s one of those rarer than rare days when some rogue short locks of Kenny’s bangs make through his hood. It twitches in the chilly wind.

Craig doesn’t really know why he watches. There’s nothing to be jealous of. There’s certainly nothing to look at. So Craig decides to look at Clyde who’s eagerly rambling about Bebe, his _second_ kiss which he says is sort of a big deal.

…

Kenny kisses Wendy, but the blonde insists, “She kissed me.”

Of course, Stan and Kenny’s friendship deteriorates and leaves the hooded one at Craig’s lunch table for a few days. They barely talk, just eat. Kenny devours all of food quickly; sometimes he asks Craig if he’s going to eat his chicken patty. He always gives it to him.

When Stan gets back together with Wendy, Kenny is forgiven; he stops sitting at Craig’s table, which is perfectly fine.

He doesn’t feel much.

…

There was another class project in the spring, this time, about a book that neither Craig nor Kenny feel like reading. They both decide to watch the movie. Craig’s dad rents it for him and the raven haired boy puts popcorn in the microwave because that’s only right, right?

When Kenny arrives a few minutes before six, he only waves. He takes a seat on Craig’s couch, denies the popcorn at first, but eventually eats it.

The movie is long and boring, something about George Washington. Craig can barely keep his eyes open. And Kenny, being the impulsive, curt kisser as he was, pecks his lips; he shoots adrenaline through the apathetic boy’s veins. The split second lip to lip contact makes his muscles tighten, his dark eyes widen as they meet Kenny’s.

“Don’t fall asleep.”

It’s so simple, so short, and so sweet Craig doesn’t say anything. He gives Kenny the finger, and cracks neck in an attempt to get rid of another tinge (Tinges are bad things too, especially when it comes to feelings) of embarrassment. But it was a kiss between two male fifth graders. It was Craig’s second kiss, and tastes like popcorn butter. It was his second kiss and he thinks that it actually wasn’t that big of a deal; it was still a bad thing. It would never be brought up again.

…

Craig can’t tell if Kenny is bad or good. He convinces himself he doesn’t care.

…

The summer begins with slightly perplexed sentiments for Craig.

In class, everyone talks about his or her summer plans. He doesn’t have any. He writes his end of the year essay slowly, thinks about his handwriting. Occasionally he thinks about Kenny. He glances at him, but from his seat, Craig can only see the back of the blonde’s hood. When he’s bored he tries to narrow his eyes, see into Kenny’s skull. It never works.

Craig doesn’t think Kenny has any summer plans either.

On the last day of school, Kenny’s not there. No one seems to miss him and no one seems to notice. Neither does Craig. He turns in his essay that day, a page long paper reiterating how “happy” he is to go on to middle school and eventually the rest of his life. Clyde cries which Craig thinks is absurd.

When he gets home, his father presents him a padlock; he can practice opening his locker. But Craig barely messes with it.

The break begins without Kenny.

…


	2. Chapter 2

_Kenny_

_“Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.” -Aristotle_

…

During the summer, Kenny kisses more soon-to-be sixth graders than he could count. A soon-to-be seventh grader kisses him, which was fun, because she really knew how to kiss. But the times when he could get away with just kisses faded away as soon as sixth grade began. Girls wanted commitment, relationships, boyfriends.

He couldn’t give that yet.

So Clyde Donovan got his first girlfriend, Bebe, Kenny figured out how to open his locker without any practice, and Stan finds the perfect lunch table. It’s far away from Wendy, but not too far away from Wendy, which is good and basically describes their entire relationship. It’s two lunch tables away from Craig’s and it’s under a flickering light. It bothers the blonde at first, but he gets accustomed to it.

The teachers are just as useless as the last, and the syllabuses are more extensive than they need to be. They’re all printed on colorful paper, like they’re actually important. The passing times seem like hours instead of minutes. Craig has a seat right next to him in English and in Social Studies, which is kind of surprising.

They barely say anything to each other. Instead, Craig’s eyes meet Kenny’s- or maybe Kenny’s eyes meet Craig’s. It’s like their eyes are having some sort of affair and it happens way more than once. Every time the blonde’s blue orbs meet the dark and stoic pools of Craig’s, he smiles.

It’s something Kenny learned how to do over the summer, smile more. Girls like it when he smiles, even if they can only see the rise in his cheeks. And Kenny likes girls; they’re sort of his thing, so it’s a win-win for everyone except Craig. The raven haired boy flips him off every time he flashes his grin.

Kenny doesn’t kiss a girl on the first day of sixth grade, which is also the first day of a three year trilogy called middle school.

Some people forget that.

…

Summer fades into fall quickly- so quickly Kenny almost forgets how to play like a normal kid. There’s no recess in middle school and everyone’s making the imperfect transition into adolescence. Some of the symptoms include a disinterest for the toys you had before, and a disinterest for the outside and staying out there until sunset. Kenny never had a lot of toys so that barely fazes him, but his friends don’t meet at the pond or the park as much.

There’s not much to do except think. So the blonde lies on his mattress, which is on the floor, and ponders about life itself. Actually, Kenny either thinks about females or Craig; he realizes that they have similarities. Sometimes, he thinks about the moon and the stars and how they could’ve possibly aligned to rest him here in South Park, immortal and hooded.

The trees’ leaves emulate his desire: dying, wanting to be understood, believed. They falter in the wind, fall to the ground like angels, and wither there. When Kenny walks, they crunch and remind him of everything he’s ever known.

…

“Kenny, let’s break up.”

He gets a girlfriend.  She’s pure, perfect, blonde, and unwilling. She has long slender fingers and she always wants to hold his hand. She never frowned when she was around Kenny. She was forever smiling, sweet and syrupy. She sticks to him.

They never kiss, never do anything vulgar. They never fight, but what do sixth grade couples argue about?

“Sure.”

When they break up, a week after they first started dating, she smiles. There’s no heartache, no residual effects. When people ask questions, Kenny just shrugs. It was all very simple: their relationship, the way she said his name, the manner in which she looked at him. There was nothing special between them and Kenny wonders what special actually is.

How do you know when you have something special? How do you obtain a special connection with someone?

…

In Social Studies, Kenny learns about Julius Caesar. Everything about him is boring, but his death was pretty cool. Caesar was betrayed by his own people, even his right hand man, Brutus. In fact, Caesar resists his attackers, but after seeing Brutus among them, he resigns to his fate. He says, “Et tu, Brute?”

And then he dies.

Kenny thinks that Brutus felt horrible for the rest of his life and then some.

If Kenny could die and stay dead, he’d want a death similar to that. He’d want to be heavy on someone’s mind, even after he had passed- not because that someone had betrayed him, but because he was just too important to let go.

No one remembers, but Kenny wants them too. He looks at Craig and wonders if he ever could. Then he realizes that he hasn’t died in quite some time.

…

When Kenny goes to Stan’s house, for whatever reason, he has to pass by Craig’s house. Unlike many houses in South Park, especially Kenny’s, the raven haired sixth grader’s home is relatively quiet. The drapes are always closed, the snow outside is always undisturbed. The blonde feels bad for leaving tracks in the snow, upsetting the peace. Peace is a nice thing to have, Kenny knows that.

He wonders if Craig ever looks out of his window; if he ever comes outside and sees the footsteps he left. He wonders if Craig knows that those are his footsteps, no one else’s.

…

Autumn melds into winter.

Kenny sleeps in his parka. As Christmas break nears, he feels weary. He’s not expecting anything.

…


	3. Chapter 3

_Craig_

_“The love we give away is the only love we keep.” –Elbert Hubbard_

…

Craig isn’t much of a conversationalist; he’s more of an observant introversive piece of shit. Sixth grade is surprisingly eye opening, exceedingly blunt. By the end of his first semester in sixth grade, which is also his first semester of middle school, Craig can look into a mirror and see things he would’ve never noticed in elementary.

Craig thinks he’s losing color in his cheeks, he found a gray hair in his chullo; he’s only twelve. There is no youthfulness, no good in middle school, not for him. There’s only holier than thou eighth graders, bitchy seventh grade girls who want to make out with Kenny (who’s always ever so innocent), and sixth graders who want to fit in with the crowd, find themselves, and break the simple unity and accord everyone once had in his and her younger years. Craig doesn’t think he’s one of those sixth graders.

Between Goth kids, nerds, and preps and jocks, Craig would say he’s a solid “I don’t give a shit.” Clyde admires, Token laughs, Tweak screams, “Don’t you know? _They can hear you_.” He has a deep paranoia of eighth graders, for whatever reason.

As for Craig’s observant eyes, his introversive and shitty eyes, they see everything. From Stan’s constant and lovey-dovey glances to the slightly pink shaded Wendy, to Cartman’s glares at Kyle for whatever laughable bullshit he suspects him for, to Kenny’s subtle self conduct.

If he’s not reading porn behind his English or “Western World” book, bright blue eyes widening every few pages, he’s drawing dicks on his class work. And if he’s not trying to flirt with Red in English or trying to cover up his stomach grumbles, he’s picking at the etching of “bastards” on his desk. It’s Kenny’s artistry, of course.

“Bastards?”

It slips one day, crackly. Puberty, probably.

The blonde looks at him and then glances out of the big middle school windows, the fresh winter snow falling outside, the world spinning round and round. Craig can see those familiar rogue blonde locks, but they’re not twitching in the breeze; there is no breeze, just the hum of the older than life heater. He can feel the veracity in his eyes, restless pools of ocean blue reflecting individual snowflakes from the world that’s in grasp but so far away. He can see his long, pretty eyelashes and he just knows- but Kenny simply shrugs.

The two boys’ eyes linger on each other for a fleeting moment, a second so short it felt like forever, and then Kenny’s eyes drift away, back out to sea.

Craig’s muscles tense. He feels something yank on his left heart string, something he hadn’t felt since fifth grade, adrenaline.

…

A week before winter break and the middle school world was still hard at work. “Those fucking fifth graders are probably living the life,” Cartman comments. Craig thinks that’s probably just the way things are. The older you get, the more life you live, the more you realize what you had in the past. And just _how_ old is Craig feeling?

A lot older than he actually is.

So Mr. Wieze, the English teacher that reminds many former eighth grade and seventh grade of a “kiddie fiddler,” hands out the assignment. The pink paper- South Park Junior High always runs out of white copy paper- says, “Write a page long paper describing snow, winter, the holidays, etc.” And Craig is just thrilled; he just adores assignments like this.

Honest.

Wendy Testaburger, the resident overachieving snob, hands her paper in first. She wrote that snow is “ineffably ephemeral, inexplicably angelic.” She says it makes her feel “lightweight.” The English teacher reads it to the whole class, the classes after Craig’s class. He went on and on for days about the beauty of her description of snow, how a simple sixth grader could conjure up lines so spectacular and Craig thought that was bullshit.

After you’ve been around South Park for long enough, snow becomes tiring. You see it all the time and you just end up hating it. In all twelve years of life, Craig has never loved the sight of the cold crystallized form of water that just stays and stays. Snow is not ephemeral at all. Snow is not angelic. Snow is a bitch that falls from the sky and makes it hard to drive. That’s just the way things are.

Craig is the sixth person to turn in his paper. He passes Kenny on the way to Mr. Wieze. The blonde has only one word on his paper.

“Why”

And Craig can’t explain why. He can’t say the whys for anything. He can’t explain the mysteries of the world, why anyone would consider snow so lovely. He can’t explain why Wendy is an overachieving snob, why Stan could like someone like that, why Clyde cries _so hard_ when he watches Bambi, or why Mr. Wieze has a very suggestive mustache. He’s not a genius and he really knows it when he passes Kenny, looks at Kenny, becomes aware of Kenny’s presence.

He can’t say why the sight of Kenny is “ineffable”; he can’t explain how ephemeral and inexplicably angelic he is. When Craig looks at him, the planet seems to stop and all of those fleeting instants the moments that seem like forever pile on him at once, and Craig can say that a real fucking angel has somehow made his way from heaven and landed in South Park. That’s just how things are.

Honest.

…

Before Craig can notice, Friday pops up on the calendar, the last day before winter break. Kenny disappears between Social Studies and English and Craig even wonders why he’s surprised. This must happen often, but he’s never really discerned the blonde’s frequent absences in years before.

The etching of “bastards” glares at him, like he’s done something seriously heinous. Or maybe it’s staring at him like he should **know**.

Know what?

By the end of school, Craig feels ambiguous.

…

“What do you think?”

Behind the glass, the really thick store window, there’s a jersey signed by some famous football player priced at two hundred dollars but Craig-

“I really don’t care.”

Clyde gives him the look; Craig shrugs. He kicks the snow near his sneakers, his colder than ice and ungloved hands residing in his small jacket pockets. There’s weary snow on his shoulders; they’ve been out here for years it seems and Craig’s trying his best not to shiver. He sighs, “I mean, you told them you wanted it right?”

“A million times.” Clyde’s voice cracks.

“Then they’re probably going to get it for you.”

“But-but… What if they don’t?” The brunette boy’s voice cracks again, but Craig can tell- he can always tell- it’s not from torturous puberty.

“I swear, if you fucking cry-”

It was too late.

…

“Are you better now?”

Clyde nods his eyes red and puffy. He takes a sip of his chocolate milkshake, sniffs. There’s a silence between them and it’s not one of those awkward silences Craig always has with a certain blonde. It’s a friendly silence. Craig fiddles with the drawstring on his jacket, Clyde sniffs some more.

“Do you need a tissue?”

Clyde glances away, as if his friend had just insulted him, “No, no! I’m fine… Hey isn’t that Kenny?” He points at a mud streaked sack of orange leaving the convenience store. There’s a transient glow around him, the twitch of rogue blonde locks. Of course it’s Kenny. It’s always Kenny isn’t it?

“You know,” Clyde says it like it’s a scandal, and it probably is, “Kenny’s been on a kissing streak. The seventh grade girls are crazy for him… I’m jealous.”

Craig doesn’t say anything. Nothing at all.

…

Due to welfare (something Craig is accustomed to by now), there weren’t any cookies on Christmas. Just eggnog.

Eggnog thick as dreadful snow.

The taste lingers in Craig’s throat longer than expected. He lingered in his new Red Racer pajamas longer than his parents expected, watched his new HD Red Racer Season 12 DVD (his favorite season) set more times than thought possible. He wondered about Clyde and Christmas for a minute, if he got the jersey he wanted so much. He pondered about Kenny and his Christmas for a few seconds, if anything had changed.

And then New Years comes.

Twelve o’clock strikes and Craig’s dad pops open the sparkling grape juice in the kitchen. Taylor Swift is dancing with Drake in New York and everything is all happy- even Ruby is smiling, her pigtails all perky. But Craig is thinking again. His hand is plastered on his pale cheek and his mind gears on whirring to paint a perfect picture of Kenny making out with some seventh grade girl.

The thought is unnecessary, but voluntary. The sigh that comes afterward is not.

He goes to bed early that night of the New Year, his head full of visions of the last time he saw Kenny, or more like the hood of his parka enveloping his being. And Craig knows he’s always looking at the profile of the blonde, matted fake fur and the glow of something special. So he imagines the next time he sees him, what that would be like, what would change.

…

After two weeks of nothingness, Red Racer, thick and eventually expired eggnog, and redundant thoughts that made Craig want to throw his brain out of the window; he realizes that if he can’t beat him, he must join him. He doesn’t need to elucidate who “him” is.

It takes him a while to build up the courage to say anything, which is weird. He’s Craig Tucker, right? So in Social Studies, as soon as the bell rings, he grasps Kenny’s parka sleeve.

“Kenny-” Oh _God_ , when has he ever said his name? It feels all kinds of right on his tongue and then it melts.

The blonde’s bright ocean blue eyes met his shitty, observant, and introversive pools and he wants to scream, “My name is Craig Tucker! I’m twelve years old! I have guinea pig named Stripe, but when I was younger I wanted a dog like Clyde! I watch Red Racer everyday at five o’clock on the dot! I got all A’s and one _fucking_ B on my report card and it really pisses me off!”

But he doesn’t.

“Hey, we could go catch a pizza sometime or…”

Kenny waves a hand.

“Just walk home with me.”

They walk home together, snow crunching underneath their sneakers, snowflakes that feel like the weight of the world falling on their shoulders. Craig sticks his icy hands in his blue pockets when he realizes that whatever distance, however giant or tiny the gap was between them was disappearing, crumbling away right before his very eyes and he decided to let it happen.

…


	4. Chapter 4

_Kenny_

_“Sometimes the heart sees what is invisible to the eye.”- H. Jackson Brown Jr._

…

It was spring and sixth grade was almost over, but the clouds hanging over South Park misunderstood. Dainty little flakes of crystallized water fell from the sky like feathers trying their damned best to keep winter alive. But eventually, the snow in South Park will begin to melt- slowly, of course.

And when it does, frail purple and pink flowers pop up between the patches of slushy snow. Birds begin to chirp.  The thawing icicles create a cacophony of drip-drop acoustics. The cracks in the sidewalks seem enormous. Kenny’s heart, like every other heart, would melt too. How long it would take was up to the sun’s rays.

Kenny finds himself drowning in the puddles. He pokes at one of the flowers whilst waiting for Craig outside school. It looks weak, tiny ice crystals covering its purple petals.

“Kenny?” Craig says his name like mashed potatoes, like he isn’t used to saying it yet.

The ice lines the sidewalks and forces Craig to walk behind him. Sometimes Kenny glances back at him and sees his dark eyelashes pointed towards the ground. They barely talk. Kenny thinks that it’s weird for supposed friendship.

He spends his time studying his surroundings. He thinks about all the beauty and all the bullshit and wonders if Craig sees it too. What if his pretty eyes notice the small things, if he ever finds himself drowning in it all? It hits him and it’s an epiphany; he doesn’t know Craig’s facets. He feels like his eyes are thrown out of focus when he looks at him. He can see everything but he can’t focus on anything. He’s a hazy kaleidoscope of different shades of blue that makes his brain ache. Craig is an enigma.

Kenny can feel Craig’s eyes on his back, melting a hole between his shoulder blades.

(He feels himself melt completely and slip through the sidewalk cracks)

…

Patricia was a seventh grader with a big heart and a small smile. Her giant curly locks felt like they belonged in Kenny’s hands. He played with them in math class instead of solving word problems.

The day after he melts, she asks him, “Do you like me?”

He smiles and whatever happens after that makes her lose her curls. She falls into the stern of his mind with all the other girlfriends, with every partner who was mundane.

…

Stan and Wendy’s on/off relationship resumes and everyone feels the side effects. She’s invited to sit with Stan at lunch.

Cartman freaks, “Aw, what the fuck is _she_ doing here?”

Kenny sees Wendy in his unassigned assigned seat settles for the one next to her. Stan’s “suspicious-you-might-steal-my-girlfriend-because-of-particular- previous-incidents” glare forces him to move to the other side of the lunch table, under the flickering light. Kenny doesn’t mind which wasn’t uncharacteristic of him.

His new seat displayed the entire cafeteria, including Craig’s lunch table. His table is half empty. Kenny watches him take small bites of his chicken patty (Kenny wants to laugh; Craig still gets chicken patties). He mostly listens to Clyde’s outrageousness, Token’s gossip, and- when he has to- calms down Tweek. Sometimes he fiddles with his chullo which was kind of cute.

Craig spots him watching; Kenny tries to look away innocently. They had a thing, a certain black hole connection between their eyeballs. One would look away, and the other would suck him right back in. Kenny feels himself smiling.

Craig’s left eyebrow twitches, which is something that Kenny hadn’t descried before. But then he flips him off almost discreetly, which was a (bad?) habit Kenny had certainly noticed before.

…

It was the gossip flowing in and out of the sixth grade classrooms. Everyone knew except Stan because Stan was oblivious as fuck when it came to Wendy. Butters lets the gossip slip after school between infamous South Park disasters, while they’re all huddled at the playground.

“She wants to break up,” Butters says carefully; Stan flinches, “What?” Kenny gazes at Butters blonde hair from the highest point on the jungle gym, where he used to sit in elementary school. He was fiddling with his fingers pitifully.

“Again?” Cartman asks to no one in particular. “What the hell is wrong with your girlfriend?”

Kyle was seated lower on the jungle gym. He speaks thoughtfully, “You should talk to her.” Kyle watches Stan dial her number and adds, “In person, probably.”

Cartman doesn’t hesitate to state his opinion, “Don’t listen to him Stan. Jews don’t know shit about women.”

“Shut the fuck up, fatass!”

Stan shushes them; he speaks earnestly, “Wendy? I heard you wanted to break up with me? Is it true?” His jaw drops, his voice was shattered like all other preadolescent voices, “Why’d you sit with me at lunch then? You said you loved me.”

Kenny struggles to keep in a laugh. His body shakes, which shakes the brittle jungle gym bars.

“You’re a bitch Wendy.”

Kenny doesn’t hear anymore fuss after that. He only hears a metal pop, a sticky slide. He releases a muffled yelp, but no one hears him. His vision fades into a familiar shade he’s seen so many times before. Their backs are turned away from his demise, which really doesn’t matter because they won’t remember it anyway.

Kenny disappears for five days and six hours.

…

Kenny mentally notes- somewhere between the jungle gym impalement and the apparent break up of Stan and Wendy- that he and the stagnant puddles of melted snow and ice are too alike.

…

In Social Studies, nothing changes. The teacher counts down the days till the end of school impatiently: four. She stops giving out class work. Everyone does what they want to do, which only leads to trouble of course. Kyle and Cartman quarrel; Wendy and Stan make up.

The etching of bastards gets deeper; Craig watches Kenny’s pen carve through the desk over and over. He can tell that the sardonic boy is curious which was honestly kind of funny. Kenny involuntarily sneers beneath his parka. He wonders if Craig can discern his grin, the rise in his cheeks.

“You don’t make any sense.”

Kenny flinches. His eyes shift from the bastards etching to Craig’s pink lips. He expects him to say it again, perhaps, but he doesn’t. He feels like he should say, “You don’t make any sense either.” But maybe he’s already said somewhere between the lines; he doesn’t know how.

He looks like the raven haired boy’s eyes. Craig blinks twice; Kenny blinks twice back.

He doesn’t know what it all means.

…

Kenny racks tallies of his loved and lost girlfriends in the restroom between Social Studies and English. By the end of the school year he reaches twelve tallies. But don’t misunderstand; he’s not proud.

He tries to remember them all: the sweet one, the intense one (she was really great), the cute one, the pretty one, even Patricia. Kenny can’t recall every girl specifically. All their smiles, laughs, kisses, and habits combine like a vegetable soup of preadolescent relationships that don’t mean anything.

It all means nothing. _Nothing, nothing, nothing._

…

After school, Craig and Kenny walk home together, past the rusty playground that murdered the blonde, and all the other ice crusted homes in South Park. The ice lining the sidewalks melts so that they can walk side by side. Between the silent steps and idle comments, Kenny brushes Craig’s hand. The raven haired boy snatches his fingers away and flicks him off.

Kenny pretends like he doesn’t notice.

They part ways at an empty intersection. Kenny utters a farewell, but Craig, being the unfriendly fucker he is, only nods. Kenny scoffs behind his parka. He paces across the street, across the railroad tracks, strides through his muddy yard, and steps into his house.

The melted snow makes Kenny’s yard a massive mud pit which Karen calls, “McCormick Mud Moat.” It protected the “castle” from intruders. Back when it was cool to use their imaginations, Karen was a prince and Kenny was a princess. Karen forced him to wear the wig and the dress after stating that he was the “prettiest.”

“No,” Kenny had said, his good brother side gleaming, “You are.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

Karen whines, “Please. I want to wear the cape.”

Together, they fought against the evil giant Kevin, who attempted to make across the yard and to the castle. He only traversed across mud moat once, and Kenny could remember the childish fear he felt. It was so unreasonable and so irrational; it was an anxious feeling.

And Kenny reminds himself of the sudden pump of blood that rushed though his veins, how his muscles tensed, the warmth he felt just by brushing Craig’s fingertips with his own. The pink tint on Craig’s face was fainter than the color in his eyes. Kenny’s anxious limbs relaxed.

It must have been that childish fear, that senseless, absurd sentiment, that incorrigible anxiety he could only feel with another.

…

It was a drunken night at the McCormick household. Kenny’s parents fought over money and then over beer, which was kind of pointless because they ended up throwing it at each other.

Kenny lies on his mattress, which is on the floor, and stares at the long crack running through his ceiling. He tries to think like he usually does. He thinks about the seventh grade girls, the untouchable eighth grade girls, all the girls in the world, all the kisses he’s ever received and given, all the girlfriends he’s ever lost.

He thinks of Craig and what he might be, how his friendship actually worked. He looks at his singed fingers, every part of skin that had touched Craig on accident. His skin was on fire still, he couldn’t stop thinking about-

A bottle smashes against his bedroom door; he cringes just like Stan. He slips out his window and saunters down the road dryly. No one will notice a thing, especially his parents.

Kenny remembers the flowers sprouting up around town, pushing their colors through the snow. He recalls the melted puddles and the mud moat around his house. He remembers all the deaths and all the piles of snow; how no one will remember them. He thinks of all the cracks in the sidewalk, and every piece of dangerous playground equipment; he was the epitome.

…

Craig’s house is the peaceful one, the easiest to find in South Park. There are still undisturbed mounds of snow lying in the yard. The icicle drips don’t sound like cacophony, but more like symphony. Kenny doesn’t want to knock because perturbing the tranquility surrounding the Tucker household seems like a sin, but he doesn’t want to go home. Craig takes seventeen seconds to the door.

The raven haired boy doesn’t look surprised. His left eyebrow twitches which is Kenny’s signal; he knows he can come in.

…

Craig doesn’t ask any questions which was very Craig of him. Kenny appreciates that.

…

Kenny’s eyes wander around Craig’s bedroom, minding every detail: the blue walls, the Red Racer sheets, and the one and only Red Racer poster loosely hanging above his nightstand. The room was a distinctive mix of neat and messy which was a lot like Craig, perhaps.

“That’s Stripe,” Craig says monotonously, gesturing to the metal cage sitting on his nightstand. He blinks and tells Kenny about the good/bad lists. He listens wholeheartedly.

“South Park is bad, the planet it worse.” Craig swallows awkwardly and continues, “There are some good things.” He eyes the blonde in a loose manner.

The guinea pig scurries across the newspaper in his age to greet his fingers. “What about Stripe?”

Craig deadpans, “Stripe is a good thing.”

He leans over Stripe’s cage, watching him nip at his fingertips. Kenny wonders who could possibly be on the good list. He wonders who could possibly be on the bad list. He wonders if he’s anywhere on the good list. He wonders if he’s anywhere on the bad list which makes him wonder if it should matter if he’s on the bad list.

He inquires quietly, maybe to Craig, maybe to himself, maybe to the universe, “What am I?”

…

They proceed to watch Red Racer downstairs. Craig finds it engrossing; it’s the widest Kenny has ever seen his eyes. He doesn’t see the appeal. How it was so riveting to such a cynical kid was perplexing to Kenny. His fingers weave and intertwine with each other while he watches the colors flash on TV. He feels his heart twinge invidious which was a strange and embarrassing sentiment for the blonde; Craig would remember this show more than anything.

Red Racer and his love interest kiss. It was one of those long, made for television kisses. Kenny gets restless. Craig breathes as if he hadn’t taken a breath in years. The couch reflects a fleeting moment specifically.

“Remember that time when we-”

The lackluster in Craig’s eyes shut him up. He deadpans, “We’re not supposed to talk about that.”

The credits finally roll and Kenny sighs. He wishes he could be more prone to memory.

…

Kenny is back in Craig’s bedroom, sitting on his Red Racer sheets as if they’re silk. Craig rummages through his things, trying to find the twelfth season of Red Racer. He watches him keenly, wanting to yank his blue chullo off his head. A few distinct strands of dark hair reveal themselves when looks down.

He forces himself to look away. He spots a gray suit as if it’s playing hide and seek in his closet.

“A suit?”

Craig glances at him, “My mom wants me to wear it for awards day.” His expression reeks of subtle disgust.

Kenny vaguely comments, “Oh.”

“You’re going right?” Craig nearly appears expectant; Kenny says what he needs to.

“Of course.”

Craig gives him a skeptical look, “You usually end up missing before the end of school.”

“I’ll be there.” Kenny smiles at him, the same smile he gives all the seventh grade girls, “We can be bored together.”

Red Racer ogles at him from the poster hanging above Craig’s nightstand. His arms are crossed like a mother’s, but they were always crossed like that weren’t they? He feels as if he has lied; he tells himself that he tried not to.

…

Kenny only waves when he leaves, Craig waves back. It was late. There was one streetlight illuminating the road home. He thinks of the last day of school, awards day. He knows he won’t get any flimsy paper awards, certainly not for outstanding attendance.

He begins to walk back home and while he walks, he tries to imagine Craig in a suit, how uncomfortable he’d be. He can picture the cynical boy fiddle with his tie, the way his dark hair would be unwillingly slicked back, how his mother would try to make him look mature. He can smell the cheap cologne radiating off his body. Kenny can feel a grin tugging at his cheeks. He tries to imagine himself in a suit, how cool and fancy he’d look. He tells himself that he needs a suit.

He _wants_ to be there with Craig. _Yearns_.

He _yearns_ to attend awards day, to be able to sit next Craig which was a startling realization; he opened a door he didn’t know how to close. He can feel the childish fear pump though every blood vessel, stopping him in his tracks. He wants to rethink and fix everything even more than he wants a suit. He wants to take everything back even more than he wants to be beside Craig.

Kenny hears tires screech behind him- and it’s the infamous sound of tire screeching, the same tone and pitch. The headlights avert his eyes and he sees his shadow shift along the asphalt. He knows what’s about to happen; he just doesn’t bother to look at it.

He was a heap of snow and he was liquefying; no one will be able to evoke this moment in time.

“What the fuck,” he says to the planet, but it’s more like a statement, a simple remark.

…

Kenny shows up at Craig’s house three days later which was, frankly, as soon as he could possibly get there. He knocks on the door twice and it takes the raven haired boy thirteen seconds to open it. Craig’s eyes shifted from Kenny’s worn sneakers to the wisps of blonde strands radiating near his forehead. He blinks three times and his left eyebrow twitch invites him inside.

“Where the hell have you been?”

They sit on the couch, Kenny farthest left and Craig farthest right. The space between them resonates. Kenny pulls the drawstrings of his parka tighter. “I don’t know.”

“I had to sit next to Wendy Testaburger for two hours.”

“I know.”

“You said you’d be there.”

Kenny can feel the cynical boy melting him again. He feels like he’s a helpless pile of snow under the sun’s merciless gleam. He responds hoarsely, puberty dripping into his voice, “I know.”

There’s an ambiguous pause.

And although he wanted to look away, or kill the tense silence with words, he keeps his eyes attached to Craig’s which was difficult. Kenny cannot read faces, especially the raven haired boy’s subtle twitches and blinks, but he was sure he was gazing at an expression of restrained relief.

Kenny sniffs, and Craig’s eyes slip. Words were imminent. Craig may ask if he wanted something to eat, and Kenny might lie and day he wasn’t hungry- to be polite, of course. It’s not right to tear through an entire bag of potato chips that’s not yours in another person’s home; he learned that after he devoured Stan’s pantry the first time he visited. Perhaps, the blonde would ask about Stripe, because he was a good thing. Or at least that’s what Craig sai-

“Kenny.”

Their eyes meet again, two pairs of blue pools clashing like ocean tides. Kenny breathes and notices how this silence is so relevant and comfortable. He feels how the empty space between them isn’t really empty. He blinks- like one of those understanding blinks- because he realizes that there are no words needed. They didn’t need to speak to let each other know. And they had said so many words to each other already, so many unspoken phrases and truths without even speaking at all.

“You didn’t miss anything.”

The snow had melted along South Park’s sidewalks and so did Kenny’s clouded vision. He can see Craig much more clearly, and the image is endearing. The blonde felt foolish for thinking he was anything different.

…


	5. Chapter 5

_Craig_

_“Gestures, in love, are incomparably more attractive, effective and valuable than words.” –Francois Rabelais_

…

Craig’s first orthodontist appointment was a week ago, but he tried to keep it secret because braces weren’t cool. “Cool” was a thing in middle school; it was what you were striving to be even if you weren’t. It could’ve been called a fad, just like kissing- but it wasn’t. “Cool” was what life came to be and it certainly encompassed middle school life.

His initial appointment consisted of x-rays and multiple and uncomfortable pictures of his teeth, which were only ever so slightly crooked. The orthodontist had explained procedure and how years would play out; it was all very boring and convoluted. Craig fiddled with the hems of his jacket while the doctor spoke with his mother (who had put aside many paychecks to pay for these braces that weren’t necessary).

“There will be discomfort,” the orthodontist said; Craig suddenly felt weary.

Another two hour appointment a few weeks later and Craig figured out what exactly “discomfort” was. It turned out that discomfort was just a euphemism for pain. Craig eats soggy Rice Krispies for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; he didn’t brush after he ate. When he wasn’t eating squashy cereal, he was running his tongue over the metal lacing his teeth, which was an annoying habit he had developed. His tongue kept getting caught in the nooks in crannies of his braces. It really fucking hurt.

Clyde appears on his doorstep one South Park summer day. When Craig opens the door he inquires in a bored manner, “You wanna catch a movie or something?”

The apathetic boy grunts in response.

Clyde looks skeptical, “Was that a yes or no?”

Craig blinks; his expression turns bitter.

Clyde remarks curtly, “Someone’s grumpy today.”

The raven haired boy sneers and smiles. He grits his teeth despite the pain.

“ _Oh_.” Clyde giggles- he actually giggles.

…

It poured the first few days of summer. Craig’s eyes followed the rain drops that darted down his window. He microwaved pizza rolls that he could barely eat and watched Red Racer until his eyes felt like they’re going to ooze out of his skull.

He had never remembered summers being like this. There was always something to do when he was younger. There was a game to play, people to hang out with, or a place to go. But it wasn’t like that anymore. Childhood was dying out slowly, fading as fierce as a sunset. Craig could feel it eating at him, gnawing at his existence.

It was like he was waiting for something, anything.

As soon as the torrential rains cease, Kenny appears on Craig’s stoop pool blue eyes shimmering like actual water. This was a regular thing for them now, which was made apparent by the soon-to-be-seventh-grader’s frequent appearances. The raven headed boy microwaves more pizza rolls and allows Kenny to devour most of them- because his teeth were still sore, of course.

“Is Stripe still alive?” he asks simply, popping another pizza roll in his mouth.

Craig watches him eat and nods. It was different hearing the blonde speak so clearly. His voice was much more tuneful without the parka. He closes his eyes and listens to him speak.

“Can I see him?”

Craig yawns and nods again, his eyes still loosely shut. When he opens them, the apathetic boy watches the other’s lips, actual pink lips, form a genuine smile that could strum a heartbeat electric.

…

Both boys are sitting on Craig’s bed, staring at Stripe. Kenny holds the guinea pig very carefully in one hand, and strokes him slowly with the other. He comments objectively, “He’s so small.” Craig glanced at him when he spoke again, “Why is he a ‘good thing?’ What makes anything good?”

Craig states simply, “Because I like him. Something is good if I like it.”

He stands and leisurely walks to Craig’s desk, Stripe still cradled in his palms. “So you _only_ like Red Racer and Stripe?” He eases the guinea pig back in its cage, “Nothing else?”

Craig blinks, “Not really.”

“Huh.” Kenny settles on the floor, lying on his stomach. He casually rummages through Craig’s belongings, until he finds old school work from elementary school. Then there’s silence; Craig can feel the blonde’s eyes drilling into his profile.

“What?”

Kenny looks dreamy and angelic. He speaks subtly, “How is it like having braces?”

He watches the blonde avert his eyes and flip through elementary grammar books, occasionally stopping to admire Craig’s messy handwriting and horrid spelling.

Craig’s voice was blank when he finally answered, “They fucking hurt.”

The blonde chuckles, “I think it’ll be worth it.” He fills in all of the empty blanks and spaces in the pronoun practice section of the work books with words like “pussy” and “dick.”

Craig scoffed at his creativity, “I don’t get you.”

Kenny smiles, “You’ve said that before.” He leans against Craig’s legs and the raven haired boy visibly tenses. He peers down at his golden hair. The blonde looks up at him, a slightly bemused gleam in his eyes.

“Are you uptight like this all the time?”

“No.”

Kenny grinned, “Just around me?”

Craig gives him a dead look and the blonde laughs. He had never heard him talk this much. It was troubling how Kenny was so comfortable and so at ease with him. He softly sighs and redirects his attention to the Red Racer comic that had just been released last week. It was his fifth time reading this issue because the next one was a month away and-

Craig’s muscles become rigid; he feels slender fingers dance up his back. His breathing hitches. Kenny wraps his arms around him slowly and gently, “ _Relax_.”

Craig’s throbbing mind sweeps over the idea; it’s quite droll. A smile tugs at his lips. He can feel his own heart pounding, and Kenny’s heart thumping into his spine. Nonetheless, his shoulders sink, he struggles to keep his eyes open. The burning grip he had on the blonde’s hands loosened. Kenny’s warm breath tickled the crook of his neck. The blonde was fairly small; he had hardly grown since fifth grade but-somehow- Craig folded into Kenny’s body like a perfect fit. His smile loses itself in drowsiness and as he slips into tangerine dreams he’s thinking, running his brain’s reel over the thought again and again: _somehow, I’m relaxed_ \- and that was, until a pair of cool lips met his heated cheek and jumpstarted his heart, pumped the adrenaline back through his veins.

Kenny speaks quietly, whispering into Craig’s red ears, “Don’t fall-”

The typically apathetic boy cracks his neck, and pushes himself out of Kenny’s embrace. Puberty leaks into his voice, “I know.”

(Craig thinks this is bad thing, how Kenny can influence his body like this)

…

Kenny’s still conjuring dirty sentences and he occasionally says them out loud. He snickers, “Anal is a great hobby. I recommend it.” Craig laughs a little, choking on his Nesquik loaded milk. Kenny sipped on his own glass; they both had red swirly straws.

The blonde says something random, “You can learn a lot about people from what kind of stuff they have in their room, you know.”

Craig yawns and asks as if he really cares about Kenny’s opinion, “What about me?”

Kenny grins, “I think you’re simple. You like Stripe and Red Racer and everyone can tell.” He gestures at the Red Racer poster hanging above Craig’s nightstand. “Everything in here is out in the open so you don’t have any porn, and you probably don’t have any secrets. You’re not a complicated guy.”

His chocolate milk suddenly tastes sour. Craig deadpanned, “Really?”

“I’m a little jealous to be honest.”

Craig scoffs, “You’re straightforward enough. You like girls and you like porn. What makes you so complicated?”

Kenny laughs and Craig thinks that he’s making fun of the question until he quotes a vulgar sentence he had written in one of the old grammar books, “Ass is one of my favorite foods.”

…

When Kenny leaves- because he _always_ leaves- Craig tells him to stay safe, which he instantly regrets. It wasn’t very Craig-like. He wasn’t sure what he was thinking, or if he was even thinking at all. The blonde was becoming second nature, which gave Craig an uneasy feeling. Kenny glanced back at him and smiled, “I’ll try.”

Craig slips back into his home and pushes his spine against his door. He thinks about going upstairs, but some organ in his body tells him to peer through his window instead.

He sees Kenny, and Craig’s shitty eyes never leave him until the impulsive boy’s orange body melds into the matching sunset, until he was nearly invisible, until he could breathe again. It was like he never existed. It was like he had died and gone away somewhere unfathomable.

…

Clyde comes over the next day and paces around Craig’s living room. He watches the brunette until he speaks, “What’s wrong-”

“Bebe broke up with me. Can you believe it?”

Craig shook his head. “Did you ask her why?”

“Of course, Craig.” He tries to explain the situation, “She said something like, ‘You’re not taking our relationship seriously.’” Really? I mean, come on. We’re in… are your parents home?”

Craig always asked for permission to cuss in other people’s homes. Craig chuckled, “No, they’re not.”

He continued harshly, “Fucking middle school!” He throws his hands up and falls back on the couch. He looks and Craig sighs, “I don’t know what she’s thinking.” He smiles, “Girls, huh?”

Craig snickers, but he tries to cover his mouth with his jacket.

Clyde’s smile disappears, “You’re laughing? Craig, this isn’t funny. One of these days you’re gonna feel like this and I fucking swear I’m gonna laugh my ass off.”

Craig laughs even harder.

…

Another summer afternoon adorns South Park; Kenny and Craig throw an aged football back and forth in the indifferent boy’s front yard. The blonde had an almost perfect spiral. Craig’s throw wavered.

It had rained again earlier that day and the air still smelled like downpour. Puddles shimmered and reflected the dull sky above them.

Kenny catches the football and comments on the achromatic clouds, “It looks hurt, doesn’t it?” He throws the ball back casually.

Craig responds when he catches it, “Sure.”

He caught a glimpse of his surroundings. Everything looked the same. The mountains, roads, and clouds were gray and silent; it was a peculiar scene.

“It’d be easy to get lost. Like, disappear somehow?”

Craig doesn’t throw the ball back. He eyes Kenny inquisitively. The blonde shrugs. Craig hears giggles from the other side of the street and glanced over at his lurking female neighbor and her friends. She was only a year younger, had pigtails that she was probably too old for, and an irritating fondness for Kenny. It was annoying how any girl could be touched so easily by him. He grips the tattered pigskin and stares at her pigtails.

Kenny waves to get his attention, “Are you going to throw it back or-”

“No.”

His decline was overshadowed by yells and protests by angry South Park citizens. A mob of townspeople swarm the streets and the soon-to-be-sixth- grade girls run inside. Craig drops the football; both boys watch South Park get swept up in typical hysteria. The raven haired boy thinks that the panic will sweep Kenny away too, but Craig looks over to see that he’s next to him.

Kenny whispers and maybe smiles, “It’s about time.”

Craig glances at the stray and twitching strands of blonde hair peeking out from under of the hood of Kenny’s parka. He finds himself peering at Kenny’s faint, dainty, lengthy eyelashes and his ocean blue eyes, the veracity of their hue. The hooded boy notices his involuntary staring before he could look away, but Craig thinks that friendship gives him permission to gawk freely.

Kenny’s eyes looked even deeper in warmer weather, almost endless. Craig could feel himself drowning in his restless ocean pools; his heart string was tugged by the tides. The raven haired preadolescent leans in toward the smaller, close enough to kiss the part of his parka that veiled his lips. He looks for something he couldn’t quite define in those bottomless pools, something that was past the flesh and bone of Kenny’s being, something to let him know that-

“What?”

Craig flinches and blinks. He pulls back and responds curtly, practically instinctively, “Nothing.”

Kenny’s cheeks rise softly; he smiles as if he understands.

Suddenly, all of the words he really wanted to say leaks out of the indifferent boy’s mouth like sentimental vomit, “Why aren’t you with them?” He subtly gestures to the pack of frantic South Park citizens razing the streets. Craig doesn’t usually concern himself with whys; he’s content with the way things are. But things have never been like this before.

Kenny looked at him like the answer was obvious; he spoke quietly, his voice drenched in brittle puberty, “Maybe I want to be with you.”

Tension ran along Craig’s muscles, and traveled through his body; he could feel his vocal cords strain. Sticky adrenaline trapped Craig in a dreaded spider’s web, which was the _worst_ feeling. He struggles to speak, straining as he utters a tight and quiet, “Oh.”

His ears ring, his skin burns relentlessly, and the slightest tinge of pink touches his cheeks. He could feel the instant fading away slowly morphing into a fleeting instant that would stain his memory with vibrant orange hues. And he could have chased the moment away, but what would have been the point?

It had already left.

“Come on,” Kenny murmured, nudging the raven haired boy’s taut arm, and sauntering past him. “I wanna show you something.” Craig glances at his orange back and dirty sneakers. He follows, eyes fixated on the cement cracked, the remnants of last night’s rain finding refuge in them, and the lost, fallen feathers of an angel.

…

Craig doesn’t look at Kenny’s orange back or anything else until the blonde says, “Here.” The apathetic boy directs his lackluster eyes toward a small opening smothered by leafy bushes. He glances at Kenny skeptically, who’s gazing back in an eager fashion. He gestures for Craig to follow and when he doesn’t, the impulsive boy grabs his hand and pulls him through the greenery. Branches and thorns pull on his jacket.

“Look.”

They were at Stark’s Pond, but at another side. A large willow tree fawned over the pond, its lamenting branches sweeping the edges of the silky water. Kenny sat beneath the tree and Craig peered at his reflection. The water displayed a rippled and distorted image; somehow, it mirrored Craig’s sentiments perfectly.

Kenny speaks from his spot beneath the tree, “This is like my home away from home or something.”

“So… you come here often?”

“During the summer, yeah.”

He motions for Craig to sit by him and he does. The sun’s rays peeked through the willow tree’s leaves and glared Kenny’s hair golden, brightened his ocean eyes. He looked ethereal maybe, delicate in ways that couldn’t quite be understood. The impetuous boy beamed as a flurry of wind created a clamor of rustling leaves. They stare at each other for a fleeting moment, but Craig averts his eyes toward the grass. He tore blades of grass one by one.

He inquired quietly, “What now?”

Kenny smiled, easing himself toward Craig, “Let’s just pretend like we don’t have to go home.” His eyes shift from the apathetic boy’s indifferent expression to his fingers gripping the grass. Kenny touches them gently, as if his fingers were porcelain, tracing Craig’s knuckles with his thumb. The blonde entwines their digits together until they were holding hands. Craig lets him; his skin grows warmer and warmer until he’s sizzling inside and out. He hoped the questions he held back weren’t apparent, but Kenny always proves him wrong somehow.

“We’re close enough, right?” It was a question aimed directly at Craig’s heart, a question he already knew the answer to. He flipped the blonde off and scoffs. The entire world seemed to stop; he felt like they were the only people on the planet.

Craig glanced at his fingers. A feeling presses against his internal organs and flutters near his lungs. His skin was on fire and he could feel Kenny’s slender fingers burning too.

…

The two soon-to-be seventh graders lounged under the willow tree for hours, listening to the wind gust through the green leaves and birds chirp symphonies. Kenny had taken off his parka; it rested on a tree branch protruding over the pond.

They have occasional, unintentional, and intense staring competitions; Craig loses every time. Kenny skips stones across the pond’s surface and attempts to teach an unwilling Craig.

The blonde conjures stories pertaining old girlfriends and the cynical boy tries not to listen. He goes on about a girl named Patricia and her bouncy curls, but gets her confused with some other girlfriend. Kenny ponders and Craig watches the specter of thought shroud his expression. The silence screams; the kind of silence everyone already knows.

_“Have they been here before?”_

Kenny must’ve heard it too. He sighs, “I get my exes mixed up; it’s funny though. I know I didn’t take any of them here.” Kenny gazes at the weeping branches in front of him- or maybe past the branches and even the pond. He circles the earth with his index finger and eventually makes a smiley face.

“I don’t know why.”

The silence between them was finally real, tangible. Craig’s stares at Kenny’s artistry until the blonde speaks, “I’m kind of hungry.” The blonde ran a hand through his hair and yawned, “Next time, we should bring some food.”

“Next time?”

“Yeah, next time.” Kenny tilts his head, as if perplexed. “You’re okay with this right?”

“…If you are.”

The blonde grinned as he reclined in the grass, “And I am.”

…

Hours fly like the birds fluttering over the boys’ heads. The sun sinks and stars glisten remarkably amid the dark night sky. Fireflies appear and the whole pond reflects the light shining upon it. Soft small town noises resonate; there’s a comfortable atmosphere. Craig’s eyes are fixed on the glow of the moon hanging in the sky; he can feel Kenny’s eyes fixed on him.

“Hey, Craig?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you think…?” Kenny shifted a little. “Say you had a friend that could live forever.” He saw the dull look on Craig’s face and hesitated, but continued, “He could die, but he couldn’t _die_ , you know? Like, he kept coming back. What if that could happen?” He licks his lips, “I mean, what would you do? What would you say?”

“I’d tell him he was a liar.”

Kenny’s eyes become as empty as the night; he pulls away slowly and smiles. “Maybe we should go.” He jumps up and smoothes out his shirt. He moves briskly, as if embarrassed. He curtly grabs his parka and puts it on; his lips were veiled again. The comfortable mood he had evolved into something anxious; he was trying to get away.

His tried to breeze by Craig like a ghost, but he grabbed the blonde’s orange parka sleeve, “Kenny.”

Kenny’s eyes were dark and stupid with firefly glow. The words wedge in his throat, but Craig speaks anyway.

“You can tell me.”

Kenny breathes, “I don’t think you’d understand.”

Craig winces a little, but not enough for Kenny to notice. He lets go of Kenny’s sleeve. All the soft, small town twilight noises wither away, replaced by piercing ringing. Craig can feel all the bastards in the world mocking him.

…

They work their way back through the thorny opening, and onto the streets of South Park. Craig followed Kenny and he followed the streetlights illuminating South Park. Neither boy speaks; they both listen to the sonata of crickets that echoed around them.

Craig’s hands were numb; he didn’t feel. He thought that Kenny was maybe feeling too much of something. He narrows his eyes and peers at his orange back, and the back of his orange head. He tries to seep into the blonde’s body and see what’s in his skull, what he’s thinking. It doesn’t work; it never does.

They reach an intersection; a shriek of tires resonates throughout the neighborhood. Kenny unhurriedly crosses the street anyway. The growls of a vehicle got louder and louder, until Craig thought that he should pull Kenny back- and maybe he tries to reach for him. Maybe he tries to save the impetuous boy from an unusually cruel fate. Maybe he doesn’t.

Kenny chuckles bitterly, his voice resounding through the night, “These fucking cars.”

Perhaps he freezes and forgets how to breathe. Perhaps he gazes at that bright and bittersweet orange and feels like he wants to cry. Craig’s not sure; it all felt like a dream. But he did know that there was a flash of headlights and then there was nothing, a pitch black void.

Craig wakes up in the middle of the night. He’s still dressed and his hands were still numb.

He couldn’t remember how or when he fell asleep. A tight feeling constricts his chest. He feels like he’s missing something. He peers down at his hands, his fingers in particular. They were still numb, but he felt a different sentiment nettling his fingertips. They were still reaching out to grasp a moment in time Craig couldn’t quite recall.

_“These fucking cars.”_

What did that even mean?

(Summer days continued to pass)

…

But those days passed like years. Craig watched reruns of Red Racer on cable. Occasionally, he’d spend his time gazing at Stripe, watching him scurry around his cage. Other times, he wrapped himself in his Red Racer sheets, fixated his eyes on his dreary ceiling and pondered over futures that could be. He thought about Kenny and how he hasn’t seen him in more than a week. He wondered when the blonde will take him back to that place near Stark’s Pond, how long they’ll lie in the grass together. He realized how cringe worthy that thought was and tried not to think.

Feelings and sentiments congested Craig’s chest senses like allergies, like the unusually warm weather. It was the thick of summer; many families were parlaying in places far from South Park. Token had flown to Hawaii and Tweek was sent to his grandmother’s. Clyde was _always_ trying to make things right with his girlfriend and Kenny had disappeared again. Craig had just assumed; he hadn’t showed up on Craig’s porch in a few days. But somehow this disappearance felt astringent and lonely.

In general, Craig had few visitors.

But Clyde stops by when he’s not trying to repair his relationship with Bebe, especially when he’s ready to give up on her. They sit on Craig’s stoop and he listens to the many woes of preadolescent break ups. Sometimes, there are tears and an entire tissue box is consumed in their wake. When stars are shoving the sunset away and it’s a little night and a little day, Clyde says something like, “But I don’t think I’m ready to let her go yet.”

Craig tries to look surprised. His left eyebrow shifts. Middle school love was so dramatic.

“I don’t want to be a loner like you,” Clyde sneers, smacking the raven haired boy’s slack shoulder.

“…What?”

Clyde always replies, “Yeah.” The brunette redirects his attention to the sky, the world in front of him, “It’s beautiful tonight.”

Craig looks too. His eyes concentrate on the fiery color of the evening’s sunset. He drifts into placid orange thoughts and wonders where the blonde disappeared to this time, when he would return, where he would or wouldn’t say he’d been, how he would say it, and why.

“It is.”

…

Kenny never shows. Craig tries not to feel much, but that’s kind of difficult nowadays- particularly because of the braces. The pain partially died down to the point where he could eat other foods besides mushy Rice Krispies, but his front teeth were still sore. Nonetheless, he could eat pizza rolls with ease.

He finishes a plate of them when ruby runs into the kitchen, “Craig, can you do me favor?”

“I know. Do you have the money?”

Ruby sneers, “Duh.” She places several dollar bills in his hands. She smiles acridly, “Get yourself something nice.”

Ruby had obtained an obnoxious craving for gummy bears over the summer. She’d ask to buy her some every week, which was unhealthy probably. But saying no was impossible; Ruby would tell mom and get him in trouble. It was the responsibility of an older brother, a responsibility he hated.

Craig takes the money and sighs, “I’ll be back.”

Ruby scoffed, “Duh.”

“Lock the damn door.”

…

Bells jingled as Craig entered the convenience store. He glanced at the young brunette behind the register before sauntering into the candy aisle. Her long, highlighted, hair was tied in a messy bun and she was focused on filing her pink nails into perfect curves. Craig could hear her chomping on gum over the drone of the soda fountain. She reminded him of Kenny, one of the many girls pinned up on his bedroom wall, one of the many girls he’d date or possibly kiss. The image came and went.

Craig skimmed the variety of candies and gummies quickly, but Ruby’s favorite wasn’t in stock. The door bells jingle again as he’s about to leave and the raven haired boy doesn’t pay it any mind until he turns and spots a blob of mud streaked orange standing among its friends.

Craig veered away from his classmates abruptly, and found himself snug between bags of chips on the other side of the store. He stared at the motley display of soda bottles in front of him and they stared back.

_What now?_

A slightly detached breath entered and left his respiratory system before he peered around the shelf.

“One lottery ticket please,” Stan says sliding a couple dollars and change to the clerk.

The clerk continues to file her nails and scoffs, “You have to be eighteen to buy a lottery ticket.” Kenny departs from the rest of his friends and leans up against soda fountain’s counter, hands stuffed in his dirt streaked parka pockets. There’s no way to get out of the store without being seen, which is okay- Craig didn’t exactly know why it wouldn’t be.

Kyle protests the clerk with reason, “But you sell cigarettes to high school kids all the time. Isn’t this like, sort of the same thing?”

The brunette put down her pink nail file and sighed, “I _sold_ cigarettes to minors. Manager caught me; I don’t do that anymore.”

Cartman whined intensely, “Ah, _c’mon_. We _need_ it.”

“Don’t whine kid; I’m not your mom.”

“Goddamn it.”

“I mean, if anyone should be complaining, it should be me.” The brunette’s expression morphs into something dreamy. She sighs, “Think of all that money that went straight into my pockets.” She makes another high pitched daydream sigh and bats her eyes dramatically.

Adrenaline pushes Craig to leave. He maneuvers toward the door gradually, past the chips and candies lining the shelves. But he stops moving before Kenny can see him.

A wave of discomfiture crashes over Craig; he can feel himself tightening again. The pounding in his heart returned louder than ever; reminded him of heavy drums. He felt silly for hiding like this; it wasn’t like him. Kenny had changed him in some way, and Craig hated how it made him feel. He was angry that he lost his chill, confused because he didn’t know where it had gone off to.

“Like we really care,” Stan says. “Just give us the ticket.”

“It’s not like you’re gonna win anyway,” she yawns as Craig slowly slinks down the convenience store aisle.

The frustration in Kyle’s voice was evident, “Look, lady, we _really_ need this lottery ticket. This is important.”

The brunette raises an eyebrow and smirks, “Important? How so?”

Stan sighs, “So this morning Cartman said that it wasn’t possible for a Jew to win the lottery-”

“And it isn’t.”

_“Shut up fat ass!”_

Craig draws out his inner Kenny, vanishes like a ghost, and floats past the hooded boy like nothingness, like a summer breeze passing through tree leaves. And he could have been nothingness; Kenny was not fazed by his presence. Craig had watched the blonde from the corner of his eye, looking for any of Kenny’s slight nuances. But the blonde kept his ocean eyes glued on the pretty brunette at the cash register the entire time, which- of course- was perfectly fine.

Craig hears the door bells jingle once last time and he never looks back. He walks a little faster, eyes directed on his new blue sneakers slapping the pavement, which were somehow sort of scuffed. Raindrops plop on his cheek and forehead; Craig runs. He wants to run into the gray of the sky, to disappear somehow, but he can’t. He tries to ignore the fierce ringing in his ears, the tinge of pink burning his skin and the nominal tinge of embarrassment and envy touching his heart.

Craig ran all the way home in the pouring rain and up a set of stairs before he collapsed face first on his cool Red Racer sheets. He turns over and stares at the ceiling- blank and empty as he wanted his mind to be- Ruby bangs on his bedroom door demanding that he give her the gummy bears he promised or else she’d tell mom. Craig tuned her out and focuses on the dissonance of heavy rain pounding his roof and the murmuring of his electrified heart until he fell asleep.

(Never, in the history of South Park summers Craig can remember, has he ached this much)

…

The last week of summer somehow arrived without warning. It had arrived so quickly, summer didn’t even feel like summer. Kenny hadn’t come over in weeks. Craig didn’t know what he did wrong; he didn’t want to care. He was very focused on not giving a fuck; His mind lingered in his desire for listlessness, his lust for his usual detachment.

He cleared his head by taking calm walks around town, observing the world from his bedroom window, and listening to Clyde carry on about Bebe and their woe filled summer. Tweek and Token come back from vacation; they all congregate at Craig’s house.

Token sees the raven haired boy’s braces and laughs. Craig tries to ask him about his vacation to Hawaii, but he says, “It wasn’t worth it.” Token and Clyde proceed to chat about the latest episodes of Terrance and Phillip. Craig listens to them and watches Tweek habitually twitch.

It’s the usual, but it’s not the same.

When it’s time for everyone to go home, Tweek asks if Craig can walk him back to his house. It was too late and he was too paranoid to walk there alone. The sunset flaring up the sky like a raging fire was some sort of bad omen, apparently. Tweek jolts, “It’s just not safe.”

Craig doesn’t argue.

Their differences smolder when they’re together. Tweek’s jittery mannerism and Craig’s calm and indifferent personality crashed in pleasant ways. The blonde would occasionally twist around to make sure nothing was going on behind him. Craig would kindly tug on his collar or his sleeve to keep him moving. Unlike Tweek, Craig moved casually, mind doused in acidic and citrus colored daydreams.

The nervous boy speaks in his typical anxious manner, but Craig doesn’t actually listen. Tweek might’ve mentioned his trip, maybe something about his grandmother, something that might’ve made him laugh. Or Craig might’ve been thinking about anal and how it was such a great hobby. The walk to Tweek’s house was somehow surreal; it was a smudge of everything familiar and remarkable, all the days that had died, this day, and every other day in the future.

He drops Tweek off at his house and waits outside until the blonde waves from his window. It was something that made the restless boy feel safe; Craig couldn’t understand it, and he didn’t try to. He walked back home and tried to get caught up in the fire of sunset rather than his sea of vexatious feelings. It looked like the world might burst into flames. Maybe it was the “bad omen” Tweek was talking about. Craig’s stomach felt queasy. Like, imagine everyone and everything catching on fire at one time-

A recognizable mud streaked, orange blob catches his eye and he stops in his tracks.

Craig looks over to see the blonde across the street hunched by flowers that had sprouted near the playground. He was twiddling their bright green stems and tenderly tearing off their vibrant, fragile petals. It was a habit probably; Craig had noticed before, but hadn’t _really_ discerned until now. He stares- and forgets that he is- until a car flashes by him.

He speaks almost reflexively, “Kenny?”

The blonde looks at him, or maybe looks past him. He sighs and continues nudging a dainty blue flower with his index finger. There’s a silence that lingers, a quiet that irks Craig and digs into his skin. He abruptly murders the stillness.

“Are you _fucking_ mad at me?”

Craig’s tone- which startled the both of them- expressed surprise. Kenny flinched. He stopped prodding the flower and looks at Craig with guilty eyes.

“…No.”

“What the fuck did I do?”

Kenny shakes his head, “Nothing.”

He sentimentally pukes up his words again, “I pissed you off somehow; you haven’t talked to me in weeks-”

“I’m talking to you now.”

Craig’s left eyebrow twitches; he couldn’t quite see Kenny’s leer, but he could feel it.

The blonde saunters across the street, making sure he looks both ways twice before crossing. He slings his arm around Craig’s shoulder and sighs. The raven haired boy looks at him, and he looks somewhere distant. He inquires quietly, “You know Abby right? From English?”

“Yeah.” She was beautiful and brunette, some seventh grade goddess (who’d be an eighth grade goddess when school started) who should’ve been impossible.

The mischievous look in Kenny’s eyes died out as he spoke, “We had a ‘thing’ over the break, but she kind of broke up with me.”

Craig stayed silent because, truthfully, he didn’t care; Kenny’s female affairs weren’t any of his business. His skin was burning and yet he couldn’t find a shit to give. Kenny pulls him in closer. He noticed how the blonde’s height had changed, how they were almost eye to eye. Craig’s stares at his diaphanous eyelashes while Kenny speaks, “She just wasn’t what I was hoping for; she didn’t understand me like I thought she would, I guess.” Kenny glances at the raven haired boy curtly. “But I’m over it. I’m sorry I took it out on you.” He slid back his hood, and delicately pressed his soft lips on Craig’s cheek, which was oddly euphoric in a way that he couldn’t quite explain.

“You liked her… a lot?”

Kenny’s pink lips curve into a perfect grin; he’s smiling a thousand smiles, but Craig doesn’t realize until he speaks. He was unfathomably clueless until Kenny spoke, until the words left his mouth, until they had graced the air, the little space left between them.

“I still do.”

Whatever euphoria Craig had felt disappeared; adrenaline rushed through his veins. He shimmied out of Kenny’s embrace, his ears softly ringing. He tried so hard not to feel, not to care- he was holding his breath, which was something he didn’t notice until his body decided to breathe. Kenny chuckled, his hair gleaming from the sunset. Craig flipped the blonde off and scoffed, “ _God_ -”

And that was the last fleeting instant before seventh grade, the last orange sunset dying above South Park that Craig admired, the second time his feelings congest, and the first time his eyelids flutter- actually flutter because this was like some sort of dream sequence, some kind of inception. Craig could’ve reached out and touched Kenny, kissed him, shut him up with his mouth; he could’ve made the moment real somehow, but would it really mean anything? Did anything mean anything? In the scheme of things, all things, sunsets, summers, smiles, nights lounging beneath the stars, and fucking hooded, blonde boys, was it really what it made him feel?

Craig asks so mellifluously that it didn’t sound like him, so faintly that he wasn’t sure that Kenny had heard him, “What now?”


	6. Chapter 6

_Kenny_

_“Love… it surrounds every being and extends slowly to embrace all that shall be.”- Khalil Gibran_

…

Frankly, Kenny had never touched Abby; there was never a “thing.” He thought about touching her _a lot_ , initiating all kinds of “things,” but she was one of the few seventh grade girls that didn’t want him, one of the few seventh grade girls that he didn’t take the time to meet. And that was okay with Kenny, there were other girls on the planet. It was a universal law, maybe; there would always be other girls.

Kenny had lied about his interaction with her because he _was_ very displeased with Craig, exceedingly disappointed. If there was one person in South Park- on the whole planet- who could believe him about his immortality, it would’ve been Craig. Kenny had taken him to secret side of Stark’s pond for a reason, of course.

And Craig was always so curious, so painfully interested in all the shit others weren’t.

_“Where the hell have you been?”_

Kenny wanted him to know, to _believe_. But he said he wouldn’t; he said that he couldn’t. It just wasn’t possible. In a sick way, the blonde felt rather _betrayed_.

Kenny thought of Caesar and Brutus.

But it was a betrayal that wasn’t really a betrayal, twenty something piercing wounds to the heart that didn’t mean anything, would never mean anything. Kenny would think of all this and frown. He’d ponder on how he was so upset and disappointed for such terribly long time, for an entire and lovely portion of summer he wished he hadn’t been.

…

The colossal amount of time middle schoolers spent doing absolutely nothing was _droll_ to Kenny. It made him grin beneath his orange parka, but it didn’t make him laugh. Sometimes he’d wonder if he would ever remember any of the loitering, any of the nothingness. He’d look at Kyle, then Eric, then Stan. Would they remember?

“We have two days…”

Kyle always counted the days before the start of school. Kenny noticed that he was a mathematical kind of guy. His grades were the highest in math; Kenny used to copy all of his math homework in elementary school.

“ _Two fucking days_.”

Kenny tried to wrap his head around summer, all the girls he kissed, all the things he did. He promised himself he wouldn’t get into any relationships over the season, and for the most part, he didn’t. He wanted to stay free of the responsibility. There were a few narrow escapes that had to be made when girls got too close or too attached, but it wasn’t anything that Kenny couldn’t handle.

There were those classic South Park disasters too. A summer didn’t pass without one or two. Or five. It didn’t matter though. Kenny didn’t mind having his head cleaved off due to some supreme, ordinary, bullshit. It wasn’t anything that he couldn’t handle.

If he had to get away, he’d always run to Craig.

And the thought of Craig and any of his cynical (and cute) tendencies still compelled Kenny to feel guilty. He wanted to sorry properly; no kisses on the cheek this time. He thought about what he would say while he drew smiley faces on Stan’s back.

Stan and such were all seated on the Stan’s porch, outside of their common gathering spot. The best friends sat together on the third step of the dark haired boy’s stoop. Eric sat in front of them because he had a huge fucking superiority complex and Kenny sat behind them all, right in front of Stan’s door. He didn’t really care.

He poked two eyes on both sides of Stan’s spine as the darker haired boy’s voice cracked under the prevailing pressure of puberty, “This… this is pretty fucked up.”

Stan’s eyes gleamed a certain shade of weary summer blue; he sighed an aestival breeze that pushed melancholy against the blonde’s intestines. Kenny knew that summer- in all of its unique South Park beauty- was finally over. The blonde smiled wistfully behind the safety of his hood.

South Park summers were dramatic, but they were always so beautiful. Kenny sighed as birds he had never discerned before soared over their heads into the blinding scarlet bleeding in the sky.

Kenny heard Eric sigh, “Those fucking sixth graders better not sit at our lunch table.”

For once, Kyle agreed, “Yeah.”

A lone leaf fell from one of the trees and loitered by Kenny’s worn sneakers. Small blotches of brown decay ate at its bright green color, and Kenny could feel something similar gnawing on his perpetual insides. A sudden breeze picked it up and carried it away to some pile of raked leaves Kenny would swim in weeks from now, when autumn was in full effect.

…

“Kenny.”

Craig had found Kenny lying beneath a single maple tree standing stoically in someone’s yard. He wasn’t really sure whose yard it was. It couldn’t really matter; there was a for sale sign a few feet from his limp body.

His eyes were closed before Craig had found him. Flurries of fall wind would come and go; the maple seeds would spiral, the intricate and dying maple leaves would float down and land on his face, tangle in hair. Kenny would brush them off, pick the helicopter seeds out of his eyelashes. The blonde had only opened his eyes by chance and Craig was there, blinking, his pretty eyes flickering like lights in a power outage. Kenny blinked back.

“Craigger.”

The raven haired boy’s face contorted; a light chuckle spilled from Kenny’s lips. He helped himself up and flicked off the leaves from his parka, one by one. He paused when Craig’s slender fingers entered his line of sight, picking a single gold leaf from his body by the stem. Kenny’s gaze met Craig’s flat expression, his lips pressed into a vacant line.

His eyes had morphed to a subtle gray, much different from the listless cerulean Kenny was accustomed to. There were small blue flecks spontaneously embedded in the restrained graphite engulfing his irises; they seemed to dance in all that ashen color, if the sun struck a certain angle of his face. Kenny had to stare.

Craig’s voice startled him, “What are you doing?”

Kenny was actually feigning death, but it wasn’t like Craig would understand. He’d close his eyes, place his hands over his heart, and settle into some sort of peace. Kenny wanted to see if death would find him, if it could. He only did this when he was _really_ bored, when he would willingly seek out fatalities to pass time (it was unhealthy, probably). A nuanced smile worked its way on Kenny’s face, “Nothing.”

Craig did not pry, and in some sensitive situations he didn’t. His lips barely moved when he said, “Fucking lame.”

“I know.”

“It’s the last day of summer.”

“…Yeah.”

There was an eternity of silence. Craig twirled the leaf’s stem between his index finger and thumb. His eyes were studying the gold outlining the delicate decay. The blonde still wanted to apologize again for his abrupt and ditching behavior; there was a push against his cerebral cortex telling him to do so, but he didn’t.

Kenny spoke quietly, “You…” Craig‘s eyes met Kenny’s. “You wanna do something?”

Craig’s left eyebrow twitched, which was a way of saying yes.

Kenny said they should do something worthwhile; it _was_ the last day of summer after all. Therefore, they both chose (Kenny suggested it and Craig didn’t disagree) the neighborhood arcade as their hangout out of all the attractions and excitements of South Park. They walked there silently, Kenny leading, Craig following. Any potential conversation that could’ve occurred was murdered when Kenny recommended that they hold hands- jokingly, of course.

Craig exchanged three dollars for twelve quarters when they arrived; Kenny already had three random quarters in his pocket. But fifteen quarters couldn’t afford many games.

“We have to plan this out.”

Kenny had the change set up in a straight line. He listed a few games they’d play and slid the quarters into corresponding groups, “Skee-ball, Pac-Man, _Dance-Dance Revolution_ …” Craig made a disapproving grunt, but Kenny and his slender fingers continued, “Those scary shooter games next to the Whack-a-Mole-”

“Galaga.”

Kenny smiled, his vivid ocean blue pools gently meeting Craig’s indefinite and monotone gray orbs. He moved two quarters into a little category all by itself, “Galaga.”

The boys lurk in the arcade until the peripheries of closing time, which was way past their bedtimes- but who really cared? They expended their few tickets on another Red Racer poster for Craig’s room, courtesy of Kenny’s remorse for his summer behaviors.

They stood outside the arcade for a while, chatting and touching. Kenny did most of the touching; Craig usually tensed and pulled away. The blonde thought about the possibilities of giving Craig a goodnight kiss in jest, the potential repercussions. But he decided against it.

The glow from the bright blinking sign illuminated the sidewalk, the shops nearby, and Craig’s sharp profile. Exuberant laughter, cacophonous sirens and buzzes blaring inside the arcade almost drowned Kenny’s voice out.

“So I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”

The raven haired boy replied monotonously, “I guess.”

They went their separate ways; Craig sauntered toward the South Park suburbs, and Kenny made his way over the railroad tracks to the other side of town eventually. They were at different ends, different homes. Kenny thought of Craig’s peaceful house and the untouched snow lingering outside of it as he slipped off his orange clothes and got ready for bed.

He collapsed on his mattress, cool autumn air chilling his skin.

_Don’t throw the fucking booze, bitch!_

He twisted his sheets, pressed his lips against the rough of his mattress; did Craig make it home alright?

_You threw it at me first!_

Was he asleep already? And if so, what was he dreaming of?

…

The first day of school was on a Friday, which was pointless really. Kenny woke up extremely early, but he unwillingly dozed off several times before actually getting out of bed. He slipped on one of his older brother’s hand-me-down shirts, his orange parka, and the classic matching pants. The sun hadn’t even shown its fiery face yet.

Kenny made sure Karen was getting dressed too; she consulted him on the outfits she had picked for the day. She kept her clothing as clean as possible and she did what she could with what she had. She mixed and matched frequently, excessively perhaps. Karen was at that age when she valued others’ opinions.

“This one.”

He pointed at the white dress adorned with small pink flowers. It was more of a spring dress, but it would make Karen stand out.

“Are you sure?”

“Very.” Kenny held the dress up by the straps. “What do you think?”

“Ken…” She sighed in a motherly fashion, her tiny fingers moving to zip up his parka. She zipped it up to his chest, which was the best she could do considering her height. Kenny noticed that her eyes were an entire shade darker than his as she peered up at him, “I don’t know what I think. That’s why I have asked you.”

Kenny skipped breakfast; there wasn’t really anything to eat in the McCormick household. But Karen indulged in a meager bowl of bland cereal and water. He observed her while she ate, asking questions about school that he had already asked days ago, questions that she didn’t particularly want to answer again. Every time his probing prompted a sigh, Kenny would smile.

He walked Karen to elementary school early. He dropped her off at her new fourth grade class and barely dodged Mr. Garrison before he went to the middle school. The halls were packed with nervous sixth graders trying to figure out how to open their lockers and smug eighth graders terrorizing them. Seventh graders were practically invisible, which was good, probably.

Kenny had the same locker as he did last year, right next to Butters Stotch. He almost forgot his combination—hell, he almost forgot how to work a padlock altogether. But he figured it out eventually, after several attempts and a few kicks to the metal door.

Kenny’s first period was math, which was going to suck major ass—he had already assumed. He might’ve had a chance at learning considering how pretty his new math teacher, Mrs. Robins, was- but then he spotted Stan and Kyle waving at him from across the class. A smirk resided below Kenny’s parka. He already knew that the common shenanigans would occur. He would never pay attention.

Kenny inquired casually, “Where’s the fat one?”

“Principal’s office.”

“Already?”

Stan sighed, “Yeah. He was making fun of the poorest kid in school again-” which wasn’t Kenny anymore, _thank God_ , “-and the guy just fucking lost it and punched Cartman in his damn throat.”

“Really?”

“Nah. He decked him in his eye.”

Kyle interjected, “He had it coming either way.”

“…Probably, yeah.”

Kyle and Stan conversed quietly while Kenny’s eyes surveyed the classroom, his pretty teacher, and all the pretty seventh grade girls in his class. One in the far corner of the class caught his eye; she had long brunette hair Kenny had never seen before. She must’ve been new. He admired her appealing features from afar before class began.

The bell rang, the pledge was spoken, and the principal expressed all of the morning announcements despite Cartman whining and crying in the background. Mrs. Robins introduced herself, starting with her marriage of three lovely years. Kenny sighed and rolled his eyes. Marriage was such a turn off.

She then proceeded to hand out the syllabus and place each of the students in a seating arrangement. Kenny didn’t expect to be seated by Craig; he didn’t even know the cynical boy was in his class. The blonde stood, a bit agape, until Craig decided to sit. He didn’t notice how tense he was until Craig spoke.

“Kenny.”

“Craig.”

The blonde could hardly muster his name—Kenny’s voice sounded brittle and clipped. His eyes darted downward, away from Craig’s indifference, and toward his empty desk. He suffered from a sudden and rare flare of timidity, which was a weird feeling to have coursing through his veins and returning to his heart.

Kenny relaxed himself by resting his head on his desk; he tried to feel for his old etching of bastards in the left corner, but there was only smooth and cool wood beneath his fingertips. And his eyes revisited Craig, the pretty flecks dotting his irises; there was a definite feeling aching near Kenny’s kidneys. He would be able to see Craig’s subtle grimace, his inexpressive nuances every morning.

Craig glances at the blonde listlessly, “You’re staring.”

“Yeah, I am.”

Kenny reached over; Craig visibly tensed. The blonde smiled at his anxious shoulders solemnly. Kenny slid the Red Racer pen off of the raven haired boy’s desk and began scratching a rather large capital “B” into the wood.

(The second part to the middle school trilogy had begun)

…

The class periods passed by quickly, like all first days do. His index finger ran down his schedule (which he was hopelessly bound to lose, like all his other school papers) -math, English, social studies, art. It was all the usual first day of school business: syllabuses and rules. Kenny didn’t try to listen. His eyes wandered around class taking notes of all the kids he knew, the ones that were his friends, and the ones that were not.

He had numerous classes with the new brunette girl, which was cool with Kenny. When Craig wasn’t there for his eyes to scrutinize, he stared at her instead.

Then lunch came and the whole school seemed to collapse into chaos as it always did on the first day of school. People practically killed for lunch tables, to be able to sit with their friends in premium spots.

Kenny waited for Stan and such to buy their lunches; he didn’t have any money to buy his and that was okay. Stan or Kyle might slide him a fry or two.

After the majority of Stan and such had gotten their slices of cold pizza, they adjusted themselves into a straight line; their eyes directed to the corner their table was located. Kenny’s optical pools of blue were locked on the flickering light above their former table; the rest of the boys were glaring at the people sitting there.

Eric huffed, “I told you this was gonna happen.”

Kyle scoffed, “Not really, fat ass. You just hoped it wouldn’t.”

Kenny’s eyes landed on the group of boys who had taken their table. He had to cringe. They were sixth graders evidently; they all had faded black T-shirts that were stained with blotchy ketchup and adorned with ridiculous puns. Most of them had braces, but their metal wires weren’t as sleek as Craig’s; the contraptions seemed to protrude from their mouths. Kenny never remembered looking so _trivial_ and _pathetic_ during sixth grade.

“Hey, Stan…?”

The cafeteria was inundated with students rushing to find friends and seats. Humanity surged around them, along with the harsh scent of school disinfectant.

“Where are we gonna sit?”

Three pairs of eyes locked on Stan and his frown. The dark haired boy sighed, his slice of pizza looking awfully old, “I don’t know.”

Kenny wanted to laugh; this was unavoidable maybe, inevitable probably.

…

Surprisingly, science was another class Kenny had with Craig. The blonde quietly gasped to himself when he saw him walk into the room, blank and apathetic. The teacher, Mrs. Leroy, had the desks set up so one student was facing the other. They sat on opposite sides of the room, at first. Then Mrs. Leroy declared that each student had to choose a lab partner for the rest of the year (and since Stan naturally chose Kyle or maybe Kyle chose Stan); Kenny was stuck with Craig.

But it certainly wasn’t a bad thing.

“Kenny.”

He breathed, “Craig.”

They sat across from each other carefully, blue and gray eyes gradually drifting away only to meet again. Kenny was eager to talk, to ask about Craig’s other classes- but Mrs. Leroy kept ranting about rules, all the binders and folders needed for class. The questions died down in Kenny’s chest.

There were posters depicting the differences between viruses and bacteria, the basic structure of a cell, and all the plants and animals native to Colorado. Craig preferred to look at those while the teacher went over her excessive and lengthy syllabus; Kenny preferred to look at him. The raven haired boy didn’t notice this time.

Eventually, the bell rang. They left school together, of course, like they always had. Their hands were hidden in pockets; their bodies were side by side.

…

School had started on the fragile fringes of fall; Kenny slipped into particular moods. Autumn worked him up in undesirable ways. He became as ephemeral as the leaves on the dying trees. He finds himself in stuck in trances and daydreams during class. Sometimes, he almost forgets that he exists.

Craig is there to remind him that he’s living, most of the time. He starts buying Kenny cherry ice pops without asking. They sit on the cracked curb in front of Craig’s tranquil home watching cars pass, their knees touching benignly. The cherry flavor stains their lips bright red.

Autumn sunlight wasn’t as strong as the summer’s rays; their surroundings looked a little bleak. A corrosive weight pulled Kenny’s intestines down, bit at his insides. Kenny spoke to alleviate the dull feeling, “How does it feel? Being a seventh grader, I mean.”

“It’s nothing different.”

“Is that good or bad?”

Craig was quiet; Kenny could feel his fingers feeling through the coarse faux fur on his parka. He slipped the hood off Kenny’s head, but it remained in his firm grasp. There was a subtle tug against Kenny’s throat. The cool autumn air nestled near the blonde’s ears; his skin was unusually warm. His gaze shifted to him, and the impassive youth stared back apathetically.

He spoke softly, “It’s fine.”

The slight strain that had lined Kenny’s throat faded; Craig had let go of his hood. His answer wasn’t really an answer, but Kenny accepted it anyway. He redirected his attention toward his cherry ice pop. He purses his lips against the red ice. His eyes focused on the leaves surrendering in their fight against the overwhelming force of wind.

“It’ll be cool, I think. The teachers are okay.” Kenny sucked in an autumn breath, “Mrs. Robins is _really_ hot.” Craig gave him a soft, but sour look. The blonde continued, a small smirk hidden beneath his hood, “We have two classes together.”

A gust of cool air came by; Craig had to adjust his chullo, “We do, don’t we?”

“Did you forget?”

Craig’s fingers were still fiddling with the hems of his hat, “Not really.” Kenny almost didn’t hear him; he was too busy slurping down the melting and dripping scarlet color from the ice pop in his hand. Kenny paused and looked at the translucency, how all the red had just disappeared. Craig seemed to sigh, “How could somebody forget you?”

It was the next instant then, that Kenny swiftly kissed Craig on the lips, a little softer than he should have. He pulled back, leaving the faint sound of osculation, a softly shut eyed Craig. When his eyelids fluttered open, Craig took the back of his hand and wiped the kiss away ardently. His knee bumped against Kenny’s; the blonde chuckled quietly, “It happens.”

Cherry smudges lingered on Craig’s skin.

…

Kenny made angels in a profuse amount of rusty leaves and Craig watched. The blonde insisted that he join; he had literally pulled Craig down in the leaves with him, but the cynical boy was unwilling. He shifted away from the crunchy pile, but he sat close by, quietly dusting leaves off whenever Kenny kicked or threw some on him. Spontaneously, like the deaths Kenny encounter, Craig remarked very quietly, “I had a dream about you.”

The blonde was barely able to hear him over the din of dead leaves. His limbs stopped moving; his eyes find Craig’s. He looked hardened in a somnolent way; he appeared as if he was on the verge of tears. Craig speaks softly again- as if he didn’t want to be heard- and his words drift with the autumn breeze, “You died.”

Kenny sits up; he can feel the dead leaves adorning his golden hair, a certain weight cascading in his stomach. He wants to cry too, but he smiles instead, “It was just a dream; I wouldn’t worry about it.”

Craig doesn’t smile back, but he tries. The right corner of his lips seems to twitch; his eyes wander to the houses down the street. Kenny’s gaze lingers on Craig. His jaw line was sharper, he was taller, and all of his features had matured. Craig had always been some hue of cute, with his seemingly cynical and uncaring attitude – but he had been accompanied by a somewhat squishy face and a real boyish pout. A weird and anxious feeling welled up in Kenny’s chest.

“You’re real cute, you know?”

Craig winces; he looks confused, surprised maybe. He flicks him off and opens his mouth to protest, but Kenny continues, “Like, good-looking? I mean, you have a nice face.”

The raven haired boy’s expression finally softened; Kenny’s heart eased, just a little- but just enough. His fingers reflexively twiddled with the warmly colored leaves around him. He spoke very softly, “Like a real ladies’ man.”

The scoff Craig provided bordered laughter. “Girls are...” He looked pensive for a moment. His words were barely a whisper, “…bad things.” He sounded a little unsure, but he turned his gaze to Kenny and nodded.

The blonde actually chuckled. Craig’s naïve scrutiny of women reminded him of elementary school, cooties and such. He smiled, “Everything’s bad.”

Craig sighed, “Not everything. I told you that.”

“Yeah…you did.” A sudden wave of weariness crashes over Kenny. He nestled in the leaves a little. The words abscond from his lips like a sigh, “And me? What about me?”

(He asked Craig very directly; he did not ask himself or the universe)

He’s wanted to know his opinion for a while, but he tries not to look too desperate. Craig tries not to look so surprised; he yanks his left eyebrow from its curt ascension. Craig flashed his middle finger; but his expression remained the same. He still had a thoughtful look, a wistful gleam shining in gray of his irises, a bottomless autumn dark drifting amid the blue flecks.

Kenny watched him, a charming smile that he usually saved for the girls at school plastered on his lips. The blonde was waiting for an answer, but Craig just looked away to somewhere distant, jaw clearly set.

He was still waiting, like always.

…

Which makes him a tad restless. Kenny had sudden urges to get out of his house, out of the classroom. He escaped the enclosures of his hectic household to see Craig during the day. He wasted bathroom passes just to hang around the halls and daydream against busted lockers.

Craig notices, probably, because he always does. When Kenny raises his hand to leave the room in science class, he pulls it back down quite vehemently.

The blonde had to blink, but he didn’t mention it. At least, not at that moment.

He was going to say something about it later, when he was over Craig’s house- but he didn’t. Kenny watched the raven haired boy rake the leaves in his peaceful yard into a neat pile (that he had the slight impulse to jump in) from the sidewalk. The evening sunset glared off his dead eyes in the same way sunsets gleamed on bodies of water. Kenny had to breathe.

Craig didn’t acknowledge his presence until he had said, “Are you going to help or what?”

Kenny felt obligated.

Once they were done with the raking, they sat in front of the mound of leaves and sighed from fatigue. Kenny lay back against the lawn; Craig propped himself up with his hands.

The blonde touched the blue fabric of his jacket gingerly, “Science class-”

“What about it?”

“I was going to ask to go to the bathroom and you stopped me.” He jabs the raven haired boy in the stomach with his index finger; Craig glowered, caught his hand, and pushed it away. “I could’ve peed on myself Craig.”

“You’ve been leaving me with all the work for a while now.” Craig jabbed him back, twice. Kenny caught his fingers between his. The raven haired boy sighed, “Aren’t we supposed to be partners?”

“Hm…”

Kenny’s eyes shifted from Craig’s to his slender fingers trapped in his grasp. He smiled, “You just didn’t want me to go, did you?”

He didn’t wait for Craig to answer before he delved into another one of his autumn day dreams. He ignored the raven haired boy’s subtle nudges, his quiet calls for him. His eyes were shut; it was if he had died. But Kenny’s mind was shrouded by the features of autumn, the leaves compiled in the yard. It was such a gigantic heap; where would it go when this season was over? How would all those leaves die? But weren’t they already dead?

Oh, they were so pretty-

Kenny felt Craig’s warm lips against the cool skin of cheek. His eyes shot open; pools of blue meet his ashen ones.

“Don’t…” A slight pink shaded Craig’s cheeks lightly; Kenny could hardly tell it was there. He tried to look away nonchalantly. “Don’t do that.”

A lightweight and quixotic sentiment pushed against Kenny’s lungs and heart. A smile eased onto his lips. He felt like he could’ve kissed Craig in return, on his lips maybe, a little longer, more amorously perhaps. But he stole his chullo and ran instead, slipping on stray dead leaves as took off. Kenny’s sneakers slapped the concrete until he forgot why he ran in the first place, until he was alone on the edges of town.

The ends of Craig’s chullo flapped in the breeze. It looked so frail in his numb hands. Kenny’s skin was burning because of the wind, probably.

…

Kenny returned Craig’s chullo the next day in first period. He placed it on his desk and mumbled a curt apology, but Craig just held it in front of his face, his iron-blue eyes burning holes in the fabric. Kenny wanted to ask if something was wrong, if he had fucked up his beloved chullo in the short time the two were apart, but Craig spoke first.

“Why’d you run?”

“Honestly?”

Craig’s gaze met his sharply. There was moment of stillness before he tugged his chullo on his head. Kenny sighed and spoke reluctantly, quietly, against the roar of the class, “You get to me sometimes.”

The cynical boy blinked. His lips feigned a faint frown.

Kenny took his seat, slowly. His eyes diverted toward the etching in the corner of his desk, “It’s not like you’re annoying. It’s more like… I feel you too much.”

Craig blinked again. Kenny tried to relate his sentiments to him in more of a Craig-ish way.

“It’s a good thing, for sure.”

…

It took him a while, but Stan found another perfect table. It was farther from Wendy than he might’ve liked, but he faced her table so he could spy effortlessly. He had a fierce glare (Kenny would know) that could find her every now and then, especially when Wendy laughed or smiled with someone else or whoever. Kyle had to slap his arm to snap him out of it.

And Eric was _devastated_ over the loss of their former lunch table- something like that, anyway. He talked about it all the time, the dreaded bereavement of the lunch table, but no one bothered to listen.

“It’s official. Our sixth grade English teacher, Mr. Wieze, is suspended without pay.”

Eric simply ignored the news. “About our lunch table-”

Kenny inquired curiously, quietly. He wasn’t expecting to cut Cartman off. “What? What happened?”

“He let some eighth grade girl mess play with his beard- something sick like that.”

Behind his hood, Kenny made a face. But it must’ve been evident from Kyle’s concurring nod. Eric tried to speak up again, “Guys-”

Stan interrupted him this time, “I told you he was a perverted son of a bitch. I fucking knew it.”

Kyle sighed, “We all did.”

“Listen to me-”

“ _No, fat ass_.”

“-We’re gonna get that table back if it is the last goddamn thing we do, dammit.”

Due to Cartman’s absurd determination, another South Park disaster occurred two periods later; it failed unfortunately. The boys didn’t get their old table back, and Eric Cartman’s pride was wounded for more than a week. For exception of a few disgruntled fucks and shits, he practically stopped speaking altogether; Kyle had found temporary peace.

But nothing else had really changed.

…

Craig invited Kenny over multiple times during their walks home from school, which was rather pointless, but cute nonetheless; Kenny would always come over anyway, without an invitation. The blonde mentioned this habit of his one day, on their way back to Craig’s house.

Craig sighed, and looked up towards the clouds somewhere, “Do you ever think you’re intruding? Do you think I’m busy, but you still come over anyway?”

“Not really. Do you think I’m-” Kenny made quotation marks with his fingers, “-‘intruding?’”

Craig sighed again and amiably slapped down the blonde’s fingers, “No, I don’t. And I don’t want you to feel like I do.”

Kenny laughed and smirked teasingly, “You want me around Craig?” He slung an arm around the darker haired boy’s shoulder.

But Craig was genuine when he replied, “You’re my friend, right?”

Kenny narrowed his eyes and pulled his arm away. Both of the boys stopped in their tracks. The blonde inquired lightheartedly, “Who are you and what have you done with the real Craig?”

And this Craig- whoever he was- chuckled, like he actually laughed. Kenny could see the black of his braces, the warmth of his smile radiating off him in waves. A pleasant feeling surged in the pit of Kenny’s stomach. When was the last time he did that? When was the last time Kenny had seen it?

It couldn’t have been that long; they see each other almost every day- but it had felt like an eternity.

…

Kenny noticed that Craig enjoyed “low commitment” hang outs.

There were times when they would just lie on Craig’s bedroom floor, stare at each other, and talk, which was “fucking lame” according to Craig, but he did it anyway. He’d lie on his stomach, arms crossed to prop up his head. Kenny resided on his back, his limbs spread in a starry manner. His eyes were usually directed at the ceiling and blue walls, the Red Racer posters, some of which were about to fall.

The subjects of their discussions would range from Stan and such, Clyde and company, to the phenomenon occurring at home. Craig would open up about his parents, but only a little. He’d tell him that his mother was a venomous bitch, that his father was a gaping asshole. He’d never really explained why, but Kenny could guess.

(His home was always so _empty_.)

Kenny tried talking about his family, but what was there to say? Craig already knew probably. Everyone did. So he would just ask about Ruby and hope that Craig wouldn’t inquire. And he did, eventually, but the question wasn’t about Kenny’s drunken parents, but his brother and sister.

The blonde had to blink.

Craig mumbled, “Ruby’s in Karen’s class. They’re friends.”

“Yeah… Karen talks about her a lot.”

“You have a brother, right?”

“Kevin.” Kenny flipped over on his stomach, so they were eye to eye. “But he doesn’t live with us. He moved in with his girlfriend’s parents. He works now; he makes his own money.”

Craig nodded. They were gradually learning about each other’s lives, which made the unbefitting, spring butterflies well up in Kenny’s stomach. Each question Craig would ask, each question he’d voluntarily answer would make a butterfly flutter near his esophagus.

And then there were arbitrary moments in which Craig would shut himself up, and focus on something far off, unfathomable. Kenny would try to reach him with his words, impulsive touches and kisses.  Craig would let him, but he wouldn’t _feel_ \- which was difficult for Kenny, who had a desperate longing for people to understand him, to feel who he was and what he doing.

The color of his eyes would lose its vehemence. The azure flecks would mingle with the rest of the iris maybe; they would simply disappear. The intense gray that once bordered silver turned into bottomless pools of lackluster.

“Do you even like Red Racer?”

Craig inquired one night, his index finger shyly prodding each subtle blemish on Kenny’s arm. The blonde spent most of his time around Craig without his parka restricting his words or expression. He donned a plain white T-shirt; he let all of his messy blonde hair loose and portions of his peachy skin open for the raven haired boy to see. But it was rare for Craig to touch on his own volition. Kenny studied his coy movements across his skin; he could feel himself seeping into the couch. When the blonde didn’t answer his question, Craig’s delicate contact ceased. His gray eyes and blue flecks met Kenny’s.

The blonde almost stammered under his gaze, “It’s okay.”

“Do you want to watch something else?”

“No.”

But Craig withdrew his hand, unfortunately. Time went by and Red Racer episodes conflicted and resolved; Kenny checked on the boy to his right regularly. Somehow the lackluster in Craig’s eyes promptly became cosmic, endlessly gray. The blue flecks swimming in his pretty irises had seemingly dissipated. Kenny frowned subtly, his fingers inching toward Craig.

“What’re you thinking about?”

Kenny poked the sardonic boy’s cheek. His skin was soft; the blonde’s index finger lingered. Craig was unfazed by his touch, which was new. He was usually tense and uptight under Kenny’s careful fingers. But Craig’s shoulders were lax; he kept his eyes on Red Racer and when he responded, he deadpanned.

“Nothing.”

“Something’s wrong. You’ve been…” Kenny’s touch turned into a tender caress, perhaps; Craig’s eyes shifted to him. “…weird lately?”

“It’s nothing.”

Kenny murmured, “Really?” His fingers and eyes had trailed down Craig’s cheek, his jaw line, his throat, and resided near his collarbone; the listless boy willingly let him explore. Kenny studied how Craig’s veins pulsed, how the muscles in his neck seemed to twitch and curtly tense as he glided his fingers over his delicate skin. The blonde breathed, “Are you sure?”

Craig reached for the blonde’s hand, squeezed it, but pushed it away indifferently. “Trust me; I’m fine.”

…

It was funny how comfortable Craig had gotten, how he was so used to Kenny’s random and wandering touches. The blonde wondered how comfortable he would get, how comfortable he’d make him by the end of the year, throughout the time they would know each other. Kenny thought about him between his contemplations of Chanel Iman and Liu Wen.

He had posters of haute couture models plastered on his walls. He’d eye them from the comfort of his mattress, his glances as brief as his thoughts of Craig.

Karen would always stop in and admire, running her small fingers over their attractive lips and faint curves amid her conversations and naïve inquiries. She asked a lot of questions for someone her age and that habit always made her seem a little younger. Karen would tell stories about Mr. Garrison and inquire if he was that crazy when Kenny was in the fourth grade.

“Yeah. He was pretty batshit.”

“Language, Ken.”

If their family was any richer, they’d have a bad language jar monopolized by Karen McCormick. Those were the kinds of nightmares Kenny had simply because he’d be just as poor.

Karen stayed in Kenny’s room more often than she stayed in her own, especially when their parents started bickering and throwing beer bottles. She’d make excuses to stay with him for the rest of the night, however long that might be; she never wanted to say that she was scared or lonely. Karen would just sneak into his room in the thick of the night and say something extraneous to wake him up.

“Kenny, could you braid my hair please?”

He could and he always would. Kenny never said no to any request of his sister.

 “Do you think I’ll be pretty, Kenny? Like her?”

Karen pointed to an older photo of Adriana Lima he had printed off at the school library in the fourth grade. Kenny paused and looked at her face, her sleepy eyes. “Of course.” His voice was suddenly concerned, a faint, but dark shade of accusatory, “Who said you wouldn’t be pretty?”

She nuzzled her stuffed animal closer, “No one.” Karen yawned, “I’m just wondering.”

Kenny began braiding again, his fingers deftly twining her locks of her hair. His tone was softer, gentler, “Are you sure?”

“Very.”

…

In math, the class learned about the basics of algebra, the fundamentals of linear functions and graphs. Kenny didn’t pay much attention; he figured it was too early in the day to learn math. He continued to work on his new etching in the corner of his desk. Craig would glance every now and then, just like he used to in sixth grade. The probing glances his pools of metallic gray provided made Kenny feel somewhat nostalgic.

But the majority of Craig’s attention was directed on Mrs. Robins and her lesson, where it should’ve been. Sometimes, Kenny wondered if Craig noticed Mrs. Robins’s _womanly_ beauty. He wanted to ask, but he had a feeling he knew what Craig was going to say.

_Girls are bad things._

And then, Kenny would say, “But she’s a _woman_ , Craigger.”

He’d say something like, “I don’t give a fuck. She’s still female.”

Kenny grinned behind the security of his hood. He imagined many conversations that they should probably have, answers to questions he should probably ask. He still had particular thoughts about Craig in the midst of his countless thoughts of ladies. It made sense to Kenny though; the cynical boy did _steal_ most of his time, nowadays.

Craig could fit the role of a thief.

Kenny reflexively glanced at Craig’s chullo, the short strands of dark hair peeking from beneath his chullo, the stoic, but pensive expression on his face. He tried to imagine him as a notorious and international jewel thief, his hair slicked back, flipped over to the side perhaps.

_…He’d look good like that._

Kenny had to swallow; he could feel a knot sliding down his gullet with much difficulty. He needed to distract himself.

He gazed past Craig, to the brunette seated in the classroom’s other far corner. She was so new, but so familiar somehow. She tucked locks of her hair behind her ear. He watched her inhale and exhale, how her chest expanded and contracted. He felt like he had seen this a million times before. She was dreadfully beautiful, like every other girl; she _was_ every other girl.

Sooner or later, she’d fall into the stern of his mind, just like every other girl. It was another one of those inevitable things.

Kenny tore his eyes away from her and tried to ignore Craig’s eyes tearing into him.

…

So Stan and such were stuck at the new lunch table, which was cool with Kenny. He had no real affinity for their former table anyway. Their seating order had changed: Kenny was wedged between Stan and Kyle and he considered this to be rather problematic, the first signs of friendship failure. He threw them both sideways glances like, “What the hell?”

But they didn’t choose to notice his concern and somehow their friendship seemed to be as strong as ever, so everything was _just fine_. Stan sat next to Eric and Eric sat across from Kyle (sometimes he’d throw grapes at the ‘Jew Boy’s’ head). The other four seats were empty; whoever could sit there. Most of the time, it was Butters and on the rare occasion (whenever the eighth graders decided to be dicks), Craig and company.

Which was really _fucking_ awkward. When Craig’s table wasn’t invaded by eighth grade assholes, he and his friends sat on the other side of the cafeteria. Neither boy could stare with so many people and so much distance between them. Therefore, they kept their eyes to themselves; this typically didn’t happen when they were in the same vicinity. So when Craig and company resided at the Stan and such table, Kenny was faced with their friendship’s usual problems.

He always tried his best to keep to his eyes off Craig, as difficult as it was, but the raven haired boy truly didn’t give a damn. Kenny would always feel his burning gaze oozing into his pores, worming through his veins. The seating arrangement was especially uncomfortable when Stan gave him the majority of his lunch. Kenny would take a small peek at Craig’s set jaw, the downward twitch of his lips, his untouched chicken patty.

The whole situation was a hassle. Eric would always start shit; he was a compulsive shit starter. It was already bad enough with Kyle, but he always seemed to have the necessity to piss off an entire crowd.

But that was at the beginning of the semester. Craig and company hadn’t visited in a while. And Eric had gone off on a trouble streak recently; he wouldn’t be seen for days at a time, which was weird… and Kenny-ish. South Park disasters sprouted up around town often.

He’d show up every now and then, disrupting the peace of the table, talking major shit. Today was one of those days.

“It’s not even October yet and the school’s already hyping it up.” Kyle gestures to the bright green paper publicizing the annual seventh and eighth grade Halloween dance. Eric snatched it off the table and crumpled it in his hands.

“It’s fucking bullshit-”

“You’re just mad ‘cause you won’t be able to get a date, fat ass.”

“Fuck you, Kyle! Girls don’t like Jews! You’re the one who’s not gonna get a date!”

Kyle effectively ignores the rounder boy ranting to his left and inquires, “Who’re you all taking?” He eyed Stan curiously, “Wendy?”

Stan practically gagged, “ _Fuck no_.” He scoffed and passed his milk over to Kenny, “I’m so over her.”

There was doubting silence from everyone. Eric even paused and stared. His lips twitched, “You’re a fucking liar, Stan.”

But it wasn’t really that hard to believe; Stan had been eyeing her lunch table less and less. And if he ever did, all the sharp fervor in his gaze would be gone. It was almost uncaring; it was almost amazing considering how “in love” they were in previous years.

 “What about you, Kenny?”

The blonde’s eyes redirected at the ceiling tile above the table thoughtfully. He sipped on Stan’s milk, “I have no clue.”

Stan scoffed, “You practically have the whole middle school to choose from, Kenny. You’re gonna be the first guy to get a date.”

Kenny shrugged, “I might not go.” But no one heard him; Kyle and Cartman had started arguing again. He glanced at Stan again, whose head was resting on his talented right palm. His eyes weren’t anywhere near Wendy, but somewhere towards the lunch line, the wrinkled lunch ladies handing out cold cheese pizza maybe.

Stan caught his brief gaze. He passed Kenny his fries, without saying a word.

…

“So who is she?”

Craig had asked spontaneously in science class, right after he had written his name on his lab report. He didn’t look at Kenny; his eyes were directed at the copious data tables showcasing his hard work.

“Hm?”

Craig’s eyes curtly met his, “The girl you were drooling at in math class. Who is she?” His voice was hushed; it was like he didn’t want anyone to hear.

Kenny’s eyelids fluttered, “Oh… _her_.”

Kenny thought about the brunette for a moment. Despite her awful seventh grade beauty, her delicacies still didn’t affect him. He shrugged, “I don’t know her name or anything.” Craig eyed him suspiciously; if the blonde really focused he could see the blue flecks floating near Craig’s irises flaring. Kenny could feel a smirk tugging at the corners of his lips, “Aw, Craig is jealous-”

Craig’s eyes were sharp, “I’m not.”

“But you care, yeah?”

The raven haired boy replied tersely, “I don’t.” He tried to write something down on his lab report, but the tip of his mechanical pencil broke. He looked back up at Kenny and blinked twice, “I’m curious.” He didn’t sound very curious; his tone was bland, as usual.

Kenny raised an eyebrow playfully. Craig almost rolls his eyes; he swallows.

“If I cared, what the fuck would that mean?”

It would mean a lot of things, but Kenny didn’t bother listing them.

…

Kenny had met Cherise when Karen had suddenly declared she wanted to learn how to roller skate. He scrounged up as much money as he could to rent a pair of skates for her. They walked to the local skating rink together, hand-in-hand.

Karen seemed astonished by the vibrant neon lights and dazzling strobes radiating on the walls; it looked that way, at least. The neon colors reflected in her wide eyes. The music’s heavy bass made her grab her chest and squeeze Kenny’s hand. There weren’t many roller skaters, but those that were circling the rink were gifted. Kenny’s eyes wandered over the rink-

And there Cherise was, behind the stained counter handing out worn skates.

“What size?”

It was very obvious that she liked him, and she was fairly cute. Her pink, glossed lips would curve to reveal her straight teeth chomping on bubble gum. Kenny could smell the fruity flavor. Cherise had long, manicured nails and long eyelashes coated in dark mascara. Her short locks were messy, but in a cute way. It looked as if she had dyed her hair red months ago; it was a light pink color that glowed celestial in the neon lights.

She touched his hand on accident maybe and an easy smile tugged at his lips, “Kid’s 5 ½.”

Kenny spent a few weeknights and weekends at the local skating rink, tying the laces on his sister’s skates, watching her learn, occasionally shouting out tips over the blaring music. But he didn’t know what he was saying really; he never learned either. So when the tears started to fall on Karen’s ninth or eleventh slip, he’d dodge the other more proficient skaters and hold her hand.

They would take an easy pace around the rink. Sometimes she’d slip a little; her hand would flash out to prevent a fall that would never happen. Kenny was steadfast. Karen would hiccup, “You should’ve done this in the first place.”

“Probably, yeah.”

And Cherise had noticed how Kenny was such a _nice guy_. She had been watching too, but her eyes were bonded to him and his orange parka.

She approached him after hours one night, and that was that. They started to _talk_ , which was basically pre-dating according to Cherise.

 She was a little older, but he was starting to look a little older so it didn’t really matter. She was remarkably fifteen. Kenny played as a freshman in high school too; he’d be one soon enough, anyway. Cherise would neglect her job’s duties to be with him.

She got fries for free from the concessions because of her job. She doused ketchup on them and picked at them with her manicured nails. She spoke very casually, “I’ve never seen you around school.”

Kenny’s eyes never left his sister, “I skip.”

Her hand touched his again, “Oh. So you’re one of _those_ guys.”

Kenny didn’t know what that meant exactly, but he shrugs anyway.

She giggled and when her laughter had expired, she sighed, “I like you.” Kenny finally looked at her, the dark mascara on her lashes. They fluttered helplessly as she said, “Do you like me?”

Kenny hummed, “I guess. If that’s what you want.” And that was good enough for Cherise.

…

Stan made the football team (as the starting quarterback) with little effort, and Clyde did too apparently. The brunette bragged on Stan’s quarterback talent during class in an exuberant manner, gestures flailing, eyes flaring with intensity Kenny had never seen before. Clyde swore that Stan would trigger a new age of victory for the South Park Middle School Bulls and a fucking coup d’état for the North Park ‘Pansies.’

Stan held the bridge of nose and sighed during Clyde’s enthusiastic rants; he was feeling the pressure of success already. And that was probably why he asked Kenny to practice with him. The blonde let a simple “why” spill from his lips.

He said that he wanted to be ready.

So he trudged through the leaf cluttered sidewalks to Stan’s house, but he was exhausted. The leaves clung to his pants and shoes similar to the way death clung to his existence. Their deafening disharmony was still reminiscent of all that he knew, of all the things he had ever seen- that would never change. Kenny realized they all went through the same routine, to live and die so eternally. But it was irking, simply tiring to have hundreds of him scattered across South Park in various places, numerous dumpsters and garbage bags, dying and dead.

…

If there was a spectrum of peaceful homes in South Park, Kenny’s house would be on the “chaotic as hell” end. Craig’s house would probably be on the “tranquil as fuck” end, and Stan’s home would be somewhere in the middle. There were days when the strangest shit would find its way out of that house. And it had the worst shade of green plastered on its walls; it made bugs crawl in Kenny’s digestive tract.

But it had a certain charm that day; the dark green exterior shone in an appealing fashion.

“Hey, Kenny.”

Stan threw up a gloved hand to wave. Kenny nodded and smiled uncomfortably.

They didn’t really spend time alone together; it was always Stan and such, never Stan and Kenny. It was awkward, honestly. The blonde peered at him curiously from the sidewalk in front of his house until Stan came up to greet him. He’d figure they’d handshake or do something ineptly formal for some reason, but the dark haired boy gave him somewhat of a half-assed hug, an arm slung around his shoulder. Kenny flinched.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m good. So…football?”

Stan yawned, his hand covering his mouth; Kenny almost didn’t hear him when he said, “Yeah, football.”

They threw the ball back and forth to each other in Stan’s yard; it reminded Kenny of long midsummer days with Craig. Colorful leaves were strewn across the dying grass, but the nearest tree was down the block. A seldom breeze would come by and flurry the leaves, distract Kenny, and obstruct Stan’s vision. The ball would veer off its intended course for both boys.

They chatted about everything it seemed: the old lunch table, the new lunch table, Kyle, Eric, _Wendy_. Kenny was surprised; the blonde thought this was an untouchable topic. He listened and didn’t say much about what was going on with him and his life. Nothing was really going on except Craig- and that was very much an untouchable topic. There was also Cherise, but she was taboo, a potential uproar; he kept her on the _low_.

But mostly, Kenny drowned in the uncertain beauty of South Park, the autumn haze. A daydream bubbled in the stern of his mind until it overflowed; his body transitioned to autopilot. He threw and caught the football without thought.

Another forlorn autumn leaf dawdled through Kenny’s line of sight. His eyes followed its peaceful descent, instead of the spiraling football flying toward him. He thought of how it was by itself, how it had no name- and if it did, its name wouldn’t matter. No one would know that it descended this day. That leaf was another Kenny-

“Watch out!”

And then, he was face-down, drowning in his blood. It was terribly painful, as most of his deaths were. He wanted to push himself up, but his arms gave out below him. A familiar fade beckoned his vision, but Kenny fought it off as long as he could. Stan rushed to his side, but he did not touch.

“Oh my God… I killed Kenny!”

Kenny wanted to laugh (to keep from crying, of course), but he couldn’t. He tried to speak, but sputtered blood from his mouth and into the dying grass. His determination to be remembered made him try again. The words he said were mushy, barely explicable, but they were enough to make Stan’s deep blue, summer stained eyes widen.

“You bastard.”

…

Somewhere between life and death, Caesar and Brutus, Kenny had groaned, “Fuckin’ lame. Absolutely fuckin’ stupid.”

…

When Kenny returned to South Park, it was the week before fall break, a Monday specifically. He wasn’t back in time for school, so he went to Craig’s house, of course. But he spots the raven haired boy skulking in the neighborhood playground, seated on one of the swings.

Kenny made his way in front of Craig, but the stoic boy didn’t acknowledge his presence. He speaks after a minute of staring at the blue chullo residing on Craig’s head. “Were you looking for me?”

Craig didn’t even look at him; his eyes were still glued on Kenny’s sneakers. “No.”

The blonde grabbed the rusty chains, feeling the prickly metal perforate his skin. “I hang out here. I thought you knew that.”

“Why would you come here?”

“It’s kind of Stan’s territory.”

Craig’s eyes snapped to his fiercely. “Is his fucking name written on it?”

Kenny chuckled, “No. I don’t think so.” The vehemence in Craig’s eyes waned; he wanted to look back down at the blonde’s shoes perhaps, but he didn’t. Kenny sighed and touched his jaw line. He spoke quietly, “But it might be. Who knows?”

“Hm.”

Craig didn’t inquire Kenny’s whereabouts verbally, but his expression was curious. His left eyebrow was perked amid his tough grimace; Kenny figured he couldn’t help it. He squeezed and pinched his supple cheeks with both hands. But then he recalled that Craig’s usual boyish pout was long gone.

“Stop, Kenny.”

It was something Craig said often nowadays: “Stop.” Kenny never really listened; the raven ashen eyed boy wouldn’t do anything. His thumbs lingered on Craig’s skin. If he pressed down- only a little- he could feel the intricate workings of his braces.

“Smile for me.”

Craig pulled away; Kenny’s skin burned. He frowned subtly, “No.”

“Why not?”

“Are you my orthodontist?”

“No. But I want to see.”

“You always want to see.”

“ _Smile_.”

Craig sighed and his lips curled upward awkwardly. The impulsive boy studied the metal wires weaving around Craig’s teeth, his thumb busy brushing the softness of his cheek. Craig’s lashes fluttered delicately, like fairy wings. Kenny told him all the time, and he tells him again, “Your teeth will be so pretty.” When Craig closes his mouth, Kenny pecks his lips.

The blonde chuckled as Craig swiped his kiss away with his sleeve; he wasn’t necessarily fond of kisses on the lips, but that never stopped Kenny. The cynical boy spoke curtly, “We’ll see.”

Kenny’s chuckle didn’t falter, “Let’s go home.” Kenny tried to hold his hand, but Craig pulled his fingers away and walked faster. Kenny had to stare at his back.

They only happened to pass the house that was on sale, the house where Craig had found the blonde weeks ago. Kenny gazed at the maple tree until he noticed that the “for sale” sign was crossed out with “sold.” The very pretty brunette from school was seated on the porch of the house, a can of soda in her grasp. She sipped on it through a bright red straw.

She didn’t wave, but she did stare, something comparable to a smile lacing her lips. Kenny stared back, his grin hidden behind his parka.

Autumn wind surged through South Park; the maple seeds circled in their descent. Colorful leaves pushed past the blonde and hindered Kenny’s view. When he could see again, the brunette was sauntering back into her new home; she knew he was watching. Her hips swayed in a way that reminded him of some older woman. He felt tired suddenly; he wanted to go home, but he didn’t.

Kenny walked Craig home and went over to the skating rink, without Karen. Cherise was behind the counter twirling her celestial-looking hair and chomping on bubble gum. She smiled when she saw him; he smiled back.

They made out in a darker corner of the rink until it closed, until the music (that was concealing the sounds they made) ceased. Cherise’s dad came to pick her up in his rusty Chevy; she kissed Kenny goodbye quite innocently; it was very contradictory to the way they were kissing before. The blonde was left under the studded neon lights with the mustached manager, trying to explain why he was the last one to leave.

…

Kenny decided to watch Stan’s football practices from the safety of the bleachers. Occasionally, he’d glance over at the pretty and peppy cheerleaders practicing on the sidelines, but his eyes were usually focused on the football, on the quarterback, on Stan.

He had potential, for sure. His spiral still had a lingering wobble, and he still had a rookie’s hesitance, but it wouldn’t matter in the end. Kenny figured that by high school, he’d be the star of the football team.

When he got out of practice, Stan’s hair would be drenched in sweat. It would stick to his forehead, right over his brows. Kenny had subtle impulses to push it back; sometimes he did, and other times he thought better and decided not to.

“Hey, hold still.”

But this wasn’t one of those times.

Stan’s eyelids flickered shut. Kenny’s fingers brushed his damp skin; he winced, maybe. He spoke with his eyes closed, “You know, you should’ve tried out, Kenny. You can throw a ball better than me.”

He thought about all the deaths that could possibly occur between the messy tackles and sharp blitzes in football season; he laughed like he had never. Kenny felt Stan’s eyelashes flutter on the palm of his hand.

“What?”

There was one thick and dark strand plastered to his wet skin, but Kenny didn’t do anything about it. He smiled instead, his voice full of charm and ambiguity, “Nothing.”

…

Kenny still visited the infamous restroom residing between the sixth grade English and Social Studies classrooms. He still kept track of his loved and lost girlfriends, scratching little tally marks down the expanse of the black stall. He couldn’t possibly remember them all. Sometimes he would stare and attempt to name them off in his head. And when he couldn’t, his eyes would drift off toward the new rack of tallies on the other side of the stall.

They represented the many innocuous times Kenny kissed Craig, all the numerous instances where he had pressed his lips against Craig’s and the uncommon vice versa. He had started these tallies on a slight impulse for aesthetical symmetry, as a simple joke, for no real reason. It was supposed to make him laugh, but enough time passed and the numbers of tallies on the right side outnumbered those on the left. Gentle discomfiture fleeted near his ephemeral, but paradoxical continuous heart. Kenny could run his fingers across their shallow etches and smolder more benevolently than a camp fire.

But it wasn’t like he had stopped dating the young women sauntering through the halls. There were girls lining up to be with him and he gladly obliged. It was just easier to plant those undemanding and trivial kisses on Craig’s lips than it was maintaining middle school relationships.

But he had certain impulses itching in his heart that induced those small touches he gave to Craig and others. Kenny had always been like that. He loved skin-to-skin contact. It was so much easier showing affection, communicating through touch.

And he had affection for Craig, of course; he was his friend. Kenny embraced all of his friends. Sometimes, it was weird or awkward because they didn’t usually let him touch, and he usually wasn’t used to touching them. But it was quite natural with Craig; Kenny liked his delicate skin, his nuanced movements under his contact. He liked how Craig wasn’t so troubled by their proximity anymore. Besides holding hands, he let Kenny do whatever he wanted. It made him so much easier to touch, so much easier to _kiss_.

Craig wasn’t the first male he had kissed. He accidently kissed Stan on the corner of mouth once in the fifth grade. He placed irrelevant kisses on Kyle’s cheek to pull him out of arguments with Eric. But he didn’t kiss girls without their permission. He touched their hands and hair, nothing else. Women had a way of taking things out of proportion and Kenny was a very fickle guy.

He kept his movements curt and quick around girls; lingering touches only caused trouble. It was like that with most girls. But Red was an unusual exception.

She was a dedicated reader, which made her vulnerable to Kenny’s embraces. And Kenny was always very polite; he’d wait until she was finished with reading a page of her book before touching her and disrupting her reading.

It was the exact reason he was leaned over her body in a very sly manner as she read in the noisy commons before school started. He read the same words she did, impressed by the advanced vocabulary. He sounded them out in his head while he was waiting.

_Os-cu-la-tor_

Wonder what that meant?

She flipped a page; he curtly placed his hands over the redhead’s eyes.

She sighed, “Kenny.”

His tone was mischievous, “Red.”

He pulled his hands away from her expression. She was looking up at him; he was leering over her. Red inquires softly, “What do you want?”

“I just came to talk. We haven’t talked in a while.”

Which was true. They hadn’t had a real and friendly conversation since last school year. Kenny didn’t really mess with her flirtatiously, like he did with other girls. It wasn’t like he hadn’t thought about it before, but the idea of making out with her was just gross.

“Be honest. You only come to me when you want something.”

Which was also reasonably true. Kenny asked for her homework when he didn’t finish his. He had recently made a habit of going to her when she didn’t finish her lunch. But Kenny playfully scoffed as if he had never used her before, “No, Red.” He slinked over the bench and next to her. “Now talk to me.”

Red hesitated. Then she held her book up to cover their conversation maybe, “You and Craig are lab partners in science, right?”

Kenny pursed his lips, “Yeah…”

“Are you and Craig _cool_?”

“What do you mean?”

She took a deep breath and glanced at the raven haired boy across the commons. Kenny glanced too. Craig was seated with Clyde and company, easing Tweek’s paranoid worries about eighth graders again. Token and Clyde talked about football, how easy the next game against North Park would be. Craig would interject randomly, between comforting phrases, “North Park’s gonna kick your asses. You’re gonna fucking lose.”

He said it to make Clyde upset probably.

“Shut the _fuck_ up Craig! You don’t know _shit_!”

He and Tweek would both snicker at Clyde’s high pitch, his red face. Kenny didn’t know Clyde could be so worked up over _football_.

When his eyes came back to Red, her lips were pressed together, her eyebrows had peaked. She didn’t need to say a thing; the words slipped out of Kenny’s mouth like soap, “Yes. We are very cool.”

There was brief moment of silence, an omniscient pause restricting dialogue between them. A faint blush crept onto her cheeks.

“…I can hook you up.”

A strained smile lined Kenny’s lips; there was a small rise in his cheeks. He pushed back a crimson strand of her hair as he whispered, “If that’s what you want.” His eyes caught another ephemeral glimpse of Craig, his signature, but subtle scowl.

Red lowered her book to her lap. Her gaze was directed toward the scuffed school floor; her blush intensified. The color of her cheeks began to match her hair. Red’s pink lips seemed to quiver, “I do.”

“Mhm…”

His gaze diverted from Red to the rest of the middle schoolers packed in the commons. His eyes met Eliza’s. She smiled; Kenny smiled back, wondering if she could discern the rise in his cheeks. He watched her walk toward the choir room with her friends. His eyes lingered on the way she conspicuously broke school dress code and displayed a distinct sliver of her midriff.

Kenny moved closer to Red; he whispered in her ear, “Hey, who’s she?”

“That’s Eliza Banks. She moved here from Denver.”

Kenny hummed, “Eliza Banks.” He nods, “E-li-za.”

…

The Friday before fall break, Craig came to school late; he had an orthodontist appointment that morning. His power chains changed from dark black to bright blue; Kenny was impressed. The new color made his eyes look a tad livelier. Kenny needed to stare; Craig needed to mention his staring as if it was something he shouldn’t have been doing.

That was during science class and as soon as the bell rang and Kenny was about to say, “You wanna watch Red Racer tonight?” Craig shut him down.

He decided to hang out with Clyde and company that afternoon, which was cool. Kenny had no objections and how could he?

So after school, he loitered around the old residential playground (Stan’s territory) with his regular friends, Stan and such. It was funny how much time they all spent skulking here, considering how old they were, but it was sort of like home. Parents in the vicinity would’ve been concerned, but the playground equipment was remarkably too dangerous for their children to play on. Rust had enveloped most of the metal parts. The plastic spiral slides, however, were essentially pristine despite their faded colors.

That’s usually where the boys preferred to lounge. Kyle and Stan were cramped together on the bottom of the slide. Eric liked being above them all; he was seated higher up in the spiral. But Kenny favored the rusty jungle gym, the other pointy, chipping, metal pieces residing in the playground. He wanted to listen rather than talk and he wanted to stay in sight, more than anything. Death was certainly foreseeable, inevitable. He had experienced it multiple times.

(And his favorite demise was still the jungle gym impalement)

It was unlikely, but maybe one of them would remember. Kenny was more hopeful than he had been in the past. He eavesdropped on the others’ conversation about Kevin Stoley, the erratic South Park behavior that had taken place earlier in the day.

“The cheerleaders mauled him- in the _good_ way. He left the bathroom with lipstick stains and shit. Then he cried in English class. Did you hear about that?”

Kyle was probably asking Stan, but Eric answered for him, “Yeah, that guy’s a fucking dweeb.”

“ _Dweeb_? Really?”

Kenny didn’t have to try to touch the faded, yellow monkey bars anymore. He didn’t even have to stand on his tippy toes. He pulled himself up so he could sit on top of them. His muscles ached; something bad was bound to happen. But nothing did. He wasn’t disappointed- just empty.

Eric continued from his perch on the higher portion of the slide, “And It’s not a big surprise guys. Girls dig nerds nowadays.” He raised his voice, “You hear that Stan?”

The dark haired boy grunted in response.

“If you want to get Wendy back from whatever dipshit she’s sucking you need to drop the football and pick up the fucking books, Stan.”

“I don’t _want_ her back, dammit!”

…                        

Kenny went to Craig’s house later that night, after Karen had fallen asleep. Crag answered the door in seven seconds, which was a record maybe- if the blonde was keeping track. His left eyebrow did that signature twitch, and Kenny was inside, on the gray carpet grayer than Craig’s eyes, on the raven haired boy’s body.

Kenny pulled him in for an abrupt hug and a silly and _meaningless_ , “I miss you,” tried to fall out of his mouth, but he caught it. He let the closeness speak for itself, despite Craig’s disapproving words.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

Kenny ignored his question and whispered into the crook of neck, relishing their proximity, “We should do something.”

Craig was steady trying to push him away, but he wasn’t _really_ trying. He deadpanned, “I can’t go out. My parents are home.”

“We should do something here, I mean. Like, in your house.”

Kenny didn’t mean it like that; he was surprised that the raven haired boy didn’t flip him off. He could feel the subtle warmth exuding from Craig’s skin, through the blue of his jacket. The blonde pulled back to a see a set jaw, a soft pink plastered on a stern scowl.

(Why was he blushing? What was he thinking about? Was his imagination traversing the possibilities of making out, potential tongue-on-tongue action?)

Craig pressed through grit teeth, “What do you have in mind?”

(Would he be open to that? Is that why he asked? Was that what he was wanting him to say?)

Kenny’s lips moved by themselves; his brain was still swelling with thought.

“A…pillow fort.”

It was childish, but Craig didn’t disagree. He just made a face like he usually did, his flush curtly fading. They found blankets and pillows all over the house and set up the fort between Craig’s bed and window. Kenny made sure all the blankets hanging over their heads would stay in place with books and noticed that the raven haired boy owned many books (Kenny had no idea that Craig was such a reader), too many actually.

Craig got flashlights from the kitchen and made a neat pallet full of pillows beneath the canopy of the fort. He ensured that it spacey; he placed an entire wall of pillows between their designated areas. Kenny curtly ruined that; he flung all the pillows around the fort while under Craig’s ashen and listless gaze.

He flopped onto the pallet when he was done. He could feel Craig ease in near him. He kept his distance, his body pressed against the other side of the fort.

Kenny turned toward him, “It’s kind of cozy in here.”

He pulled a Playboy magazine from the ripped inner seams of his parka. His fingers flipped through the pages as he crossed his legs. Craig’s gaze began to burn.

 “Do you take porn wherever you go?”

“…Yeah.”

Craig sighed and directed his eyes toward the seventh issue of the Red Racer comic. The flashlights illuminated both boys’ reading material, however graphic it might’ve been. They both got tired around the same time; Kenny was amused by Craig’s cute and futile attempts to fend off sleep. His head would gradually fall forward until his chin met his chest. The blonde pondered the likelihood of kissing him like this.

He didn’t know his voice could get so husky, “I can keep you up, if you want.”

Craig flipped him off, a frown pulling his lips downward; he knew exactly what Kenny was thinking. He yawned, his middle finger never failing, remnants puberty breaking his nasally tone, “Let’s just go to bed.”

So he turned off the flashlights and told Kenny to stop staring and the blonde tried- he really did. But his fading gaze lingered on Craig until his eyes could no longer keep themselves open. And when he was on the verges of dreams, he had a sudden impulse to reach out and touch.

His drowsiness made him hungry for closeness and physical contact (he had habits of balling up his paltry sheets and snuggling them). He feels for Craig through the covers and pillows, his eyes still shut. Kenny’s fingers eventually find his. The blonde brushes his way up the expanse of Craig’s bare arm.

“Kenny…”

It was a warning maybe, but Kenny didn’t heed it. His fingers crept over Craig’s skin until he touched his face, or more specifically, his lips. The corners of Kenny’s mouth slid upward. Kenny could feel Craig’s breath on his fingers as he spoke.

“Kenny, stop-”

The blonde was suddenly near him; he abruptly pressed his lips against Craig’s. The contemptuous boy shifted in an attempt to escape, but Kenny kept his hands on his shoulders. The blonde tried to _push_ \- he wanted to feel the metal and wires surrounding Craig’s teeth. A husky sound came from the depths of Kenny’s throat- but Craig pulled away; Kenny opened his eyes when they parted. The raven haired boy scowled and flipped the impulsive other off.

Craig says it a little louder than intended maybe, “ _Fuck_ , Kenny…” The blonde snickered and tried to placate him, “Shut the hell up Craig; you don’t want your parents to hear, right?” The darker haired boy was slapping the other’s hands away. The flashlights tussled with the sheets and pillows; a tenuous one turned on. Bright light glaringly flickered in Kenny’s eyes, until it focused on Craig’s _distressed_ expression. His eyes lingered on each Kenny’s listlessly; the blonde stifled any persisting giggles. The pillow fort was still.

Kenny took advantage of the sudden tranquility and curtly pecked Craig’s lips once again.

“You’re so fucking-”

Craig tried to expunge the kisses with his sleeve, but Kenny grabbed his wrist. The raven haired boy glared, but the blonde smiled sweetly. His voice was atrociously honeyed, so much so, it was almost unfamiliar.

“Let it stay.”

Craig’s stern look remained, but softened ever so slightly. Kenny grinned and fell back onto the pillows and covers. He closes his eyes and murmurs, “Those were goodnight kisses.”

He can hear Craig scoff, “Fuck you.” The blonde chuckles softly in response. Craig was probably flipping him off again. “Go to sleep, you asshole.” He turned off the flashlight that was glaring in his remarkably gray eyes.

So Kenny turns his head so he’s a little closer to Craig, because the cynical boy couldn’t see him get closer. He could feel his languid warmth. He sighs in a dreamy manner, “Sweet dreams.”

…

Craig had woken up first, but he had stayed in the fort peeking at the wrinkled Playboys Kenny had brought. Dim morning sunlight beamed through Craig’s window and tried to beam through Ruby’s pink blanket, but to no avail. It illuminated half of the pillow fort (including Craig) hot pink. Craig’s eyes were narrowed at the flimsy magazine; he looked like he was confused- which was weird.

Kenny chuckled, “Craigger-”

He flipped a page gradually, his gray eyes taking in everything they could, “I don’t get it.”

The blonde propped himself up on his left hand. “You’re not supposed to ‘get it’ Craig. You just look and admire.”

Craig turned the book sideways, “Huh.” He squinted, “I guess she has nice tits.” He flipped the magazine around to show Kenny.

He laughed, “Yeah, she does.”

Eventually, (after much awkward gawking at the Playboys) they deconstructed the pillow fort they had worked so hard to make. Craig returned Ruby’s pink blanket. Kenny put all the pillows back where they had found them.

Then, they devoured overflowing bowls of Lucky Charms in the kitchen. Craig spooned chocolate Nesquik into his milk; Kenny ate the cereal part, avoiding the assorted marshmallows as much as possible. He ate those last. They both drank their leftover milk.

“Craig-”

Kenny looked at him, but there was a feeble chocolate milk mustache adorning the skin above his upper lip. The blonde chuckled and impulsively tried to wipe it away with his fingers- and surprisingly enough, Craig let him. A grin curved Kenny’s lips.

 “-it’s fall break.”

…

But it was still routine, mostly. Kenny mostly hung out with the same people, in the same ways that he had always been. Stan had practice over fall break for the upcoming middle school football tournament, and he was kind of the center of the troop, hence the name, “Stan and such.” So their friend group didn’t get together much. Kenny and Kyle (because Eric did not give a flying fuck, of course; he said it many times) went over to the field to watch him some, but they mostly gossiped about the cheerleaders.

“You see her? With the blonde pigtails?” Kenny tried not to point at her while she tumbled on the sidelines.

“Yeah.”

Kenny cracked a smirk, “She made out with Butters Stotch behind the bleachers during the last football game, tongue and all.”

“Dude, that’s sick!”

It became a regular thing over break and even after seventh grade, but the gossip, or shit-talk in guy’s terms, would only get sicker. It would come with age.

Besides football and cheerleaders, Kenny still kept up appearances with the ladies. But he didn’t really have an official girlfriend over the break. He just fooled around, especially with Cherise at the skating rink. They certainly weren’t in love or anything; this was just a simple “thing.”

But she thought they were both in love, or she was in love, at least- which was probably bad. Kenny let her thoughts run free though; Cherise was _such_ a good kisser. She’d use her tongue (which was _breathlessly_ new for him), run her fingers up and down his body (which made him squirm), and let him take the lead (which was a little nerve racking actually). And when they parted, her manicured nails would run across his cheeks. It was very exciting stuff.

Kenny would touch Craig’s soft lips when he could and think about that certain crimson shade of kissing, all that exciting stuff, and smile. And Craig, as prying as he was, would raise his eyebrow and frown a little, just a tad- enough to let Kenny know that he was curious. Kenny’s smile would grow wider. He would hum some love song.

Craig would discern the tune, sometimes- his frown would deepen into fervent grimace. And he would push Kenny away with very little strength, but the blonde would fall in the heaps of leaves anyway. That was only a fraction of the shenanigans; they still watched Red Racer together, and sat on curbs staining their lips bright red. They’d go to the arcade occasionally, pockets full of quarters. He visited Stripe from time to time, and Craig would let Kenny hold him.

Then, there were the kisses- which were light, fluttering, and fleeting. They were exceptionally innocent and unexpected for both boys. It was rare, but Craig would lean in and plant a kiss on Kenny’s cheek or the corners of his mouth; he vehemently avoided the lips, which was amusing.

As said, it was all routine.

But Eliza seemed to lurk everywhere he went during the break.

Sometimes, she would be at the arcade when he would walk in with Craig playing ghost shooter games with wide eyes. The pixel monsters would reach for her, and the colors of the blood and guts would flash in her face, gleam in her eyes. Eliza looked real pretty-like, and Kenny would’ve stared if he could’ve- but _Craig_ was in the vicinity, of course. He’d creep to the Skee-ball machines in the back as fast as he could.

The places he’d loiter, the people he’d hang out with, Eliza was always near. She might’ve been at the skating rink watching his attempts to stick his tongue down Cherise’s throat, but he wasn’t really sure.

He could’ve considered her coincidental appearances unnerving and bothersome; he didn’t. He still felt nothing for Eliza, but when he was at home- lying on his mattress that was lying on the floor- he thought of her. He only thought of Craig’s cynical intricacies when a bottle smashed against his home’s thin walls, when Karen wandered into his messy room wanting to talk about the perplexing topic of boys.

…

Kenny spontaneously decides to take up smoking as a hobby during the break; Craig joins him. The raven haired boy steals a lighter and a few cigarettes from the small box in his mother’s purse. Kenny hassles Kevin to buy him some; he was of age.

They didn’t have to be careful about smoking in the open anymore. No one really had the nerve to tell them not to smoke, and no one actually cared. Besides, they were both impeccably thirteen; they were practically adults. So they march down South Park streets, puffing toxic smoke wherever they went, wreaking havoc on the already shitty air quality.

They blow puffs of smoke in each other’s faces, coughing as novices usually do.

Kenny waves some smoke away and laughs between coughs, “This is fun.”

A corner of Craig’s mouth twitches, “I guess.”

He takes a lengthy drag from his cigarette, but falters. A loud and fierce cough erupts from his body; he practically heaves over the bridge. Kenny grabbed onto his blue jacket with one hand (to prevent any falls; Kenny _knows_ fucked up shit can happen at any time), and slapped his back with the other.

Craig sputters, “I’m not fucking dying…”

“Better safe than sorry, right?”

Craig turns to face him, ashen eyes and sapphire flecks seemingly cracking into his skull. He pulls another cigarette from the nearly empty box in his pocket and set it ablaze with his mother’s stolen pink lighter. Kenny watched him; he had a certain grace that came along with his puffs of smoke, a smooth style that the blonde discerned right away. He looked older, cooler, like he had been doing this for years.

The dark haired boy mumbled, “Whatever.”

 And that might’ve scared Kenny. He was helplessly impetuous; he never thought of the consequences of smoking. Kenny’s lungs would come back without a trace of black anyway. But Craig didn’t give a shit; he was that kind of guy. He could burn his lungs to crisps and embers and shrug it off.

Kenny gasped to himself, felt a small jolt of epiphany shoot up his spine; Craig was horrendously _mortal_. An inclination shook the blonde’s body and he slapped the cigarette away from Craig. It landed on the cracked pavement. The sardonic boy glared; Kenny took an excessively long drag from his cigarette and hacked, “Cigarettes will kill you.”

Craig didn’t say anything. He cordially grasped the blonde’s lit tobacco (Kenny let him perhaps), his eyes lingering on the burning end. His fingers splayed; the cigarette fell to the ground and Craig squashed it underneath his foot.

…

At the end of the day, it was Craig who walked Kenny home. The blonde let him, mostly. He didn’t want to explain the circumstances, why he was uncomfortable with Craig (or anyone for that matter) being so close to his frantic home. Kenny was naïve to the troublesome nature of his household when he was younger; he wasn’t embarrassed at all. He certainly wasn’t as self-conscious as Karen, but his home was off limits to others.

He didn’t even let Stan and such across the train tracks.

But Kenny figured that maybe, just maybe, Craig would just drop him off in front of his home, before the train tracks even.

He didn’t.

The raven haired boy walked him right up the front door (that had a definite bulge from a drunken Stuart punching it). Kenny turned to look at him before opening the door, swallowing before speaking. “You want to come in, right?”

“Duh.”

Kenny whispered, his grip on the doorknob tightening, “My parents are home.” Craig knew about the terrors of the McCormick family just as much as anyone else in South Park. He could probably hear them now. Muffled shouts and screams tried to force themselves through the door.

But the raven  haired boy simply didn’t care. Craig drawled, “I’m not scared.” He cocked his head to the right. His eyebrows rose in a way to inquire, “ _Are you?_ ”

_Stop asshole!_

Kenny’s eyelids fluttered; his breathing hitched. A cacophonic series of crashes resounded throughout the whole neighborhood, it seemed; the blonde sighed, a sudden breeze of discomfiture and fatigue whisked him away like the windswept leaves. He purses his lips; his gaze descends to meet Craig’s tilted expression.

_You dumb bitch!_

He was going to say something, explain what he was feeling-

_If you put as much fucking effort into finding a job as you do being a drunk bastard, we wouldn’t be living like this!_

And he knew that he had to say something, fucking anything. Craig deserved an explanation for why he couldn’t come in-

_Don’t start with me Carol- not tonight._

But Craig had the prettiest ashen eyes; Kenny always _knew_ , but he had never _noticed_. They were so distracting. The azure flecks circling his dark pupils were so captivating; the blonde had seen nothing like it before-

_We wouldn’t be like this!_

(A loud slap echoed; the whole world could hear it)

Kenny curtly dragged Craig back over the railroad tracks by his hand. He spoke softly, voice crackly, “Can I stay at your place again? Is that okay?”

Craig squeezed his fingers, “Yeah. You can.”

(It took him a while to realize he was holding Craig’s hand, that the sardonic boy next to him was willingly holding his.)

…

They lied on top of his Red Racer covers, simply appreciating each other’s presence. Kenny had taken his parka off; Craig’s chullo resided between them. His fingers pressed his forearm lightly, almost timidly. Kenny missed his rare and warm touches; he nearly melted into Craig’s sheets and seeped through the pores of his mattress.

Craig circled the pronounced veins on his wrist until Kenny pushed his dark hair back, just to see how it would look. Craig’s moonlit and silver eyes shifted from his arm to the subtle movements of his hands.

Kenny’s fingers ran from Craig’s new and ephemeral hairdo to the soft skin of his cheek. The cynical boy didn’t flinch; he didn’t tense. He hadn’t been lately, but Kenny wanted to hear it from Craig himself, “You don’t mind? Me touching you, I mean.”

“No, I…” He leaned into his contact for emphasis maybe; they were very close- _close enough to kiss_. “I’m used to it.”

“That’s good.”

“I guess.”

Kenny took his turn to circle the dark haired boy’s skin. He spoke quietly, his eyes fluttering shut, “You can’t come over…yet.”

Craig murmurs, “I know.”

The blonde pressed his lips against Craig’s wrist and said, “It’s not like I don’t want you to. I just don’t want anyone to see that.”

“I know.”

“I don’t let Stan, or Kyle, or anybody come in.”

“Hm.”

Kenny could feel Craig’s muscles tense as he sighed, “I’m just saying. It’s hard for me.”

Silence lurked. Kenny thought about staying like this forever, Craig’s wrist in his hand, Craig’s fingers grazing his skin. He could feel his pulse, his heartbeat bracing his lips. It was so comforting to be-

“Closer.”

Kenny opened his eyes and glanced at the cynical boy, his dark and mussed hair subtly splayed against his blue pillows. The moonlight echoed in his gray and inexplicably infinite eyes; he looked like he was about to cry again.

“I’m closer than them, right?”

“You are,” Kenny barely uttered, “so kiss me.”

And Craig did, softly, and gently. Craig breathed; their foreheads touched. Kenny didn’t want to open his eyes, and he didn’t. He slid down Craig’s body and resided by his lungs. The blonde could feel the oxygen release from Craig’s respiratory system, the warm fingers hesitantly lightly stroking through his hair. Kenny kept his fingers locked with Craig’s, his head close to the cynical boy’s chest. Kenny listened to the soft thump of Craig’s heart resonating behind his sternum and ribs and fell asleep, just like that.

(He dreamt of Craig mussed in his Red Racer sheets, dreaming of his blonde and bloody dead body.)

…

Kenny woke up before Craig this time and he gazed at him for a while before leaving. He looked so serene and calm; his expression was endearing. He got off the bed and folded the half of the sheets he slept on over to cover Craig. Although Craig probably wouldn’t have approved, Kenny planted a kiss on his forehead and gently smoothed its affection into his skin with his thumb.

His touch lingered until Kenny happened to spot Stripe’s steady and beady gaze from the metal cage across the room and quickly withdrew his hand. He wandered around Craig’s room, eyes studying all of his personal belongings carefully.  Kenny had always taken the time to observe the walls and posters, but he focused on the smaller details.

There were vibrant post-it notes his mom left reminding him to do his chores, and an entire waste basket full of crumpled ones. Kenny wanted to laugh; Craig didn’t like being told what to do. There was a blue notebook on his desk in which he wrote little notes to himself. Kenny swept his fingers over his handwriting, which was a pretty mix between cursive and print.

_fuck Wendy Testaburger_

Kenny could only imagine.

_Stan Marsh can kiss my ass, fucking seriously_

Phrases like these took up the first line below the heading space on some pages, as if it was the most important thing. Kenny chuckled; it was very Craig-like. The blonde continued to flip through pages of school notes and simple _tomfoolery_ , pausing occasionally to study small doodles of Red Racer (Although, Craig didn’t seem like the doodling type) and frustrated, scratched out attempts to study algebra. They were embellished with curt words like:

_fuck this shit_

_the entire school system can suck a big, fat dick_

_Mrs. Robins can chew on the balls_

(Kenny tried imagining that many times from now; he practically painted a masterpiece on his eyelids)

It was very cute, very Craig.

Kenny found an empty page in the middle of the notebook and wrote, “Thanks,” in blue pen. He folded the cover back, and left it open to that page before sliding on his parka and slinking down the steps. Ruby was in the kitchen, propped on a chair trying to reach the cookies in the top cabinets.

She almost slipped when she saw him, “Holy fuck-” When she steadied herself, she said, “You scared the hell out of me. Jesus Christ.”

“Sorry-”

Ruby narrowed her eyes at him, as if she couldn’t quite see him, “You’re that orange fuck that Craig hangs around right?”

Kenny drawled, “The one and only.”

He couldn’t help but be charming; it was in his blood perhaps.

“Yeah, he sort of talks about you…when he actually talks.” Kenny thought she might expound on some of the things Craig might’ve said, but she didn’t. His eyes left her crossed arms as he started sauntering toward the door.

“Hey.”

His gaze caught her again. Her taut expression softened. She seemed to sigh, release a hefty weight.

“Tell your sister I said hi.”

He nodded and curtly stepped out into Craig’s quiet neighborhood. A sudden blast of chilly air made him shudder. Winter was starting to set in already. He sniffled. School would start again, soon.

…

And when it did, nothing changed. Mrs. Robins was still hot and married; schoolwork was still boring; Craig was still immaculately cute. Kenny would touch during class (it was just so difficult to resist); he’d run his fingers across any bare skin- which was bold. It was sort of an unwritten rule not to do that in school, in front of everyone. And unbelievably, Craig would touch back.

It was very brief, but it made Kenny’s heart pound against his sternum.

When school was over, they walked home together, side by side, hands out of pockets. Their fingers brushed in a benign manner until Craig glanced back to check for onlookers, evidently. He seized Kenny’s hand in the roughest, but gentlest way. It was almost impossible to describe the warm lurch in the blonde’s stomach, the butterflies swarming near all of his internal organs, and the size of his eyes peering down at what he’d call _fucking history_ years from now.

His fingers wrapped around his hand. Craig responded to the simple acceptance of his subtle embrace, “It won’t always be like this because this is fuckin’ lame. Don’t get used to this.”

Kenny liked how he referred to their proximity as “this.” A smile widened behind the blonde’s hood, “Then, why are you-”

“Don’t.”

He had to let go of Craig’s hand eventually. And when he did, he dropped each slender finger from his grasp one by one, much to Craig’s restrained chagrin.

“Kenny, what’s wrong? You don’t seem… _into it_ , today.”

(He’d hear this _so many times_ in later years)

And he always seemed to find Cherise afterward. They were in their common corner, saturated in the dark of the skating rink. She had one hand on his check, the other on the waistband of his pants. He had to slyly pull her hand away, between sloppy kisses. She was wanting more, and Kenny wanted less. He enjoyed the propinquity; he disliked the love. He figured he had to end it now before she expected him to propose.

 “I was just thinking that…”

The lights came up on the rink; Kenny winced, but his faulty gaze on her lingered. He never noticed how huge Cherise’s eyes were, how they were a lovely hue of hazel. He had never discerned how red her hair actually was; she must’ve dyed it again. He wondered how he had never noticed until now. He ran his eyes and mind over all of her features as he spoke.

“…we probably shouldn’t do _this_ , anymore.”

Her pink lips hardly moved, “ _This_?”

Kenny gestured to her, then to his chest. He shifted, “You know. This.”

Cherise’s expression contorted into something of confusion. Kenny didn’t want explain, but he did. He said this was just a “thing.” She gasped, her pretty pink lips making an O shape; he continued, words spilling from chest.  He said that their relationship never meant anything- not to him, at least. He did say that she was an exceptional kisser, the best he ever-

“You dumb fuck!”

The palm of her right hand struck the left side of his face. Kenny could feel ketchup doused fries pelt his cheeks and his parka.

“You broke my fucking heart…”

Cherise ran out of the rink, tears ruining her overdone mascara. Kenny could hear the Chevy zoom off into the distance. She had left him under neon lights with the manager again, his disappointed (or amused? Kenny couldn’t tell with the mustache) expression glowering over him and the large ketchup stain on his parka.

The blonde sighed and wiped away the red condiment splatter on his cheek. Kenny had broken Cherise’s heart, her _fucking_ heart. This was serious, but he didn’t really know how to feel. Powerful? Guilty? Both? He tried picturing it in his head, an actual heart break. He witnessed the shatter, the explosion, the red shards darting in the blanks of his mind. And yet there was nothing. Just a stinging cheek, a peculiar feel.

Eventually, Kenny marked Cherise down in the bathroom stall. She wasn’t really a girlfriend- not officially anyway- but she was close enough. Cherise was number twenty five. He never told anyone about her; he kept her to himself. But times would come by when Kenny felt like he wasn’t getting enough of Craig’s attention, when he’d be much too focused on school work or Red Racer to notice the blonde. He’d be tempted to mention Cherise then, let her impishly slip his tongue- but Kenny would steal his chullo instead. It was a simpler alternative.

…

But Craig was always so humorously inquisitive. Craig wanted to know everything, and yet he wanted to know nothing at all. It depended maybe. If Kenny had disappeared due to an untimely death, he’d be the first and the only one to ask where had gone off to. He wanted to know about all the trouble Kenny got into, when he got into it and how. Craig didn’t really care for the girls though; he could probably care less.

Kenny stopped mentioning them when he was with Craig. The blonde felt like it took away the _authenticity_ of their friendship. But Craig would know whenever something was up with one of them, whenever something had happened. Although he didn’t care about the numerous girls Kenny loitered with, he cared about the way they affected Kenny.

It was all very funny to Kenny, all very cute.

“Are you okay?”

Kenny leaned over Craig’s sniveling body; he was slumped in the depths of his couch, face down. His head was turned to the side, dark hair mussed over his brow. His beloved blue chullo rested on the arm of the chair. His left hand hung over the sides of the couch in an indolent fashion.  Kenny handed him a ball of tissues. The stoic boy deadpanned, his voice even more nasally than usual, “Hell no.”

The blonde had come over that evening so he could watch the new episode of Red Racer with Craig. He hadn’t expected the raven haired boy to be sprawled out on his couch, lying in a plethora of snotty used tissues.

Craig said that he had taken his allergy medicine, but it was going to take a while to kick in. Kenny didn’t even know he had allergies. But the fluctuating South Park temperatures had brought them on, apparently; Craig had said that, at least. He was plagued with a runny nose and a scratchy throat.

Kenny had suggested something more plausible considering the time of the year, “Maybe you have a cold?” He wanted to feel Craig’s forehead; he didn’t.

Craig had shrugged and swallowed the pills anyway, “Fuck it.”

Eventually, the medicine remedied all of his symptoms- but it forced Craig into somewhat of a drowsy stupor.

Kenny had warned Craig about this side effect too, “You’re gonna fucking pass out Craig. Is that fine with you?”

But Craig shrugged again, blowing his nose in a tissue, “ _Fuck it_.”

Craig probably thought that he could fight off the lethargy, but he failed miserably. He kept dozing off during Red Racer; Craig’s head kept falling on Kenny’s shoulder. The blonde had to help him up the stairs and into his bed. He had Craig all snuggled amid his Red Racer sheets when he stirred; he lifted his right hand.

“Kenny…”

His index finger was directed at the red and puffy scratch on Kenny’s cheek. He pointed; he didn’t touch. Kenny didn’t let him enunciate his curiosity; he knew what Craig was going to ask.

“It was a cat.”

Craig’s eyes closed as he spoke; the words spilled out of his mouth sleepily, “A _pussy_ cat?”

“Heh. Yeah.”

The raven haired boy was practically talking in his sleep, “That’s fucking lame.”

Craig was silent for a while, despite a few quiet murmurs and hushed curses; Kenny thought he had fallen asleep. The blonde tried to slink out of his bed and room quietly, but Craig grabbed his shirt. He groaned, “Fuck you, Kenny.”

The impetuous boy was pulled back down on his bed; Kenny’s fingers touched Craig’s tense fist munificently, then brushed back the lengthy dark hair hanging in his (still tightly shut) eyes. The blonde chuckled to himself mostly, “You really need a haircut-”

“If you don’t stop fucking dying…”

The grip on Kenny’s shirt waned; eventually, Craig liberated the white fabric completely. He must’ve actually fallen asleep. He had that endearing look, that cute charm that inundated his expression when he slept. Kenny articulated his thoughts aloud, his fingers twirling Craig’s excessive black locks.

“What are you going to do, Craig?”

“What can you do?”

His heart lurked somewhere near Caesar; it fled from Brutus.

…

Craig got his haircut a few days later. There were no more perceptible dark strands of hair peeking beneath the boy’s chullo; Kenny missed them somewhat. He told this to Craig in science class when they were supposed to be reading about the cell membrane’s permeability, but the blonde was secretly admiring porn. Craig was reading the latest issue of the Red Racer comic.

He only responded with a jaded, “Oh.”

Kenny pursed his lips and narrowed his ocean eyes; Craig’s left eyebrow twitched. There was a lengthy, silent pause before Craig spoke again, “What did you want me to say?”

Kenny sighed, “I don’t know.”

The bell rang minutes later; Kenny stuffed the magazine in his locker- where a lot of his porn was- and blew a small kiss to the young Kate Moss taped to the metal door. Kenny was surprised to turn and see Craig’s sour expression.

They left the school together, Kenny grasping for the other’s hand in vain. Instead of going home, they dawdle in front of the arcade, in front of the signs declaring “the most fun ever” that had yet to glow in the darkness of night.

Kenny and Craig finally figured out how to smoke adeptly, without loud coughs in between drags. They’d loiter outside shops, particularly the arcade, cigarettes pinned between index and middle fingers, dark smoke clouding their perspectives. The blonde felt like a real fucking hooligan, a delinquent of some sort, and maybe Craig did too. The left corner of the raven haired boy’s mouth would twitch, briefly curve to resemble something like a smirk.

Managers, employees, and distraught parents would always complain.

“Don’t you two have parents to go home to?”

“Not really.”

(Which was kind of the truth)

Some referred to them as, “You two.” Kenny would always toss Craig a haughty smile, and something similar would be tossed back. They both enjoyed the art of smoking too much for their own good maybe-

“Look at you two.”

He never thought he could recognize her voice; he had never heard her speak before. He had birthed certain possibilities of her voice in his nighttime ponderings, on his rough mattress; this wasn’t anything close. He thought she’d sound more girly, more innocent. But her voice was dangerously similar to that of a woman’s.

Kenny had to sigh.

“What are you up to?”

 _Eliza_.

An apathetic feeling pulled his Kenny’s lips into a false small. He felt like Craig; he really didn’t give a fuck. His voice was polite and honeyed. It was his usual tone he used with women. “I don’t think you know us.”

Eliza combated his assumption quite curtly, “I know who you are.” The blonde pursed his lips as she continued, “Craig.” He was hoping that she’d be into Craig, but she looked at the blonde with a dreamy twinkle in her eye and smiled widely, “Kenny.” She tilted her head, brunette locks flowing to the left of her, “Do you know my name?”

Kenny glanced at the raven haired boy next to him, his clenched jaw. His eyes bore into her relentlessly; the blonde brushed his fingertips against Craig’s hand. His gaze shifted to Kenny, but its fierce gray tone had suddenly died; his eyes were dim and despondent. Craig knew, and Kenny knew that he did.

Kenny’s lips laced into a small grin as he whispered, “Your name’s Eliza.”

The brunette smiled, most likely. Or maybe she blushed and fluttered the way only beautiful young women could. Kenny wanted to see how she reacted to him, but he had shut his eyes tight. It was better not to see, probably; he could feel Craig seething. His lips moved on their own, maybe-

“E-li-za.”

…

“I’ve always wanted to talk to you.”

“Mhm.”

“You’ve been _swarmed_ by girls lately.”

“Mhm.”

“I’ve never had the… _courage_.”

Kenny wasn’t bothered by Eliza; he was never “bothered” when a pretty girl took the time to talk to him. He was just stressed, which was a different feeling in Kenny’s mind. He kept his lips painfully pursed, his fists as clenched and compressed as Craig’s jaw. His eyes were everywhere, every possible nook and cranny in his view that could keep him from meeting Craig’s smoldering gaze.

He just wanted to reach over, grab the sardonic boy’s arm, and pull him into a tight embrace, a mushy kiss.

“ _Can’t you see we’re busy here_?”

But he kept listening, kept responding. Kenny was excessively polite for the circumstances. He focused on her until she had scrawled her number on his arm in red pen. And when she had walked off, hips swaying so forcefully for someone of her age, Kenny breathed. It was back to nothing. It was back to Craig.

…

Kenny (almost quite literally) dragged a remarkably unwilling Craig to one of the numerous and inconspicuous alleys around town after school; frankly, it was his favorite. A putrid stench of alcohol and dauntingly large rats loitered between the walls. A dreadfully orange light hung above and shadows dimmed the rest of what the light couldn’t reach. All of this pertained to the small passage beside Kevin’s job: Skeeter’s Bar and Cocktails.

Craig had a concentrated scowl plastered on his face, “The shit is this?”

Kenny’s voice blended with the ventilation hums, “Kevin got us cigarettes and bootleg DVDS. He was going to give us the stuff after he got off from work.” He added honey to his tone, “I just thought we’d come over here a little early-”

“So you could spend more time with me?”

A hopeful smile curved onto Kenny’s expression, “Maybe, yeah.”

Suddenly, there was a thin cigarette hanging from Craig’s tight lips. His mother’s pink lighter was in one hand, and the other cupped the small flame. The cigarette bobbled in his mouth as he mumbled, “Fuck.” The flame from the lighter flickered. He sighed and spoke louder, “Fuck it.”

They didn’t speak after that, but Kenny pressed his lips against Craig’s and tasted the nicotine residing there countless times. He’d kiss him gently, deeply (which was only a little longer than what he was used to; Kenny still kept their kisses some hue of seventh grade innocent), every way Craig would let him-but the cynical boy was unbearably apathetic, dreadfully preoccupied with his thoughts. His eyes were cosmically dreary, dead and gray. The blue flecks were missing; they had disappeared inexplicably.

Kenny paused between each word planting insignificant and innocent kisses along Craig’s cheek, the downward corners of his mouth as he spoke, “You’re upset with me.”

Craig sighed, “I’m not.” He removed all the kisses Kenny had so meticulously placed with his sleeve slowly.

Kenny’s fingers traced his fragile jaw line, “You are.”

Craig growled, “No. I’m not.”

The blonde’s tone was mischievous, “Tell me.”

The raven haired boy spoke abruptly, “I _want_ to fucking strangle you-” But Craig touched his throat in a manner that was quite contradictory. He wrapped his fingers around Kenny’s esophagus cautiously. Although he could feel the pads of Craig’s fingers pressing into his skin, he barely constricted the blonde’s breathing.

Kenny chuckled, “Yeah.” He murmured softly, “Do it.” He lifted his chin and felt the pressure squeezing his neck ache, then falter.

Craig scoffed, “I can’t.”

Kenny blinked; Craig let go of his throat, but the impulsive boy grabbed his hand. “Why?”

“Because-”

Craig kissed him once again, but on the susceptible and delicate skin of Kenny’s neck; the blonde flinched backward against the brick wall. He watched the raven haired boy exhale a cloud of smoke as gray as his eyes, “If I did, what the fuck would that mean?”

Kenny studied Craig’s dark eyelashes, the indifferent gray orbs peering into his perpetual existence. Kenny could feel his heart pounding against his sternum- he couldn’t remember when it started beating that fast. He suddenly realized how painfully close they were, how easily Kenny could lean in and kiss him again if he wanted to. The urge to do that quivered near his spleen, almost too gentle for him to notice. Truthfully, he was embarrassed—his skin began to smolder, and for a moment in time he thought that this might’ve been another death that had yet to consume him.

But this didn’t really hurt like it was supposed to, and Craig was so calm and composed behind the dim glare of orange; Kenny had to get away. His fingers instinctively stole Craig’s chullo. His legs almost took off without him. He left Craig behind in the shadows, in the illumination of one achingly orange light. Kenny ran for the stars, the moon, anything unreachable, untouchable, and unfathomably far off.

(He had never felt like this before.)

…

Kenny deserted Craig’s chullo on his stoop, eventually. It did take him a couple days to return it. He had it hanging on the doorknob to his room. The ends would dangle and dance whenever a bottle smashed against the door. Over the weekend, he watched it from his mattress until he fell asleep; he watched it until he was absolutely sick of seeing it.

The blue chullo compelled him to think of Craig, the vulnerable spot on his neck he pressed his lips against. He’d run his fingers over his burning skin and let a dreamy sigh escape from his eternal lungs. His body wanted to fucking melt- which was dangerous. He was going to wait until Monday, but he returned it on Saturday.

And Kenny didn’t return the chullo formally. He just rang the doorbell and left. Kenny did not want to watch the raven haired boy pick it up and study it with his listless eyes in the way he had imagined he would. He did not want to talk in the way that they had always talked; he didn’t desire those small kisses amid meaningless words and phrases. Kenny only had a desire to feel a little less, to look at Craig and have no quivering sentiments floating near any of his organs.

…

Some deeper and darker shade of winter floats over South Park during October; the season usually flared early like this. The trees were basically bare. The piles of leaves lost all of their warm color. It snowed from time to time, enough to make small mounds and light dustings over town.

The same shade of winter finally creeps into the pores of Kenny’s skin; it chills his bones. He sleeps in and takes a voluntary sabbatical from school to stay at home.

The McCormick household was relatively quiet during the daytime hours; the majority of the bullshit went on at night. Kenny’s parents were usually sprawled in random corners the house in all kinds of twisted and hung over positions in the morning.

He was forced to see them, unfortunately.

Cherise’s older brother was out for blood apparently; he’d been asking if anyone had seen an orange clad “fucker” around town. He’d rather stay inside than get beaten to a pulp. Kenny passed the time by fixing Karen’s hair, playing with her in all the haphazard junk outside of their home, flipping through pages of dated Playboys, and sleeping on his mattress (which was on the floor). And he dreamed about lots of things: Craig, Stan and such, Kate Moss, and other various and assorted women, mostly models. And oddly enough, he’d have awful dreams about dangerous playground equipment. Kenny had more dreams in those days away from school than he had ever experienced in his life maybe.

But sometimes Kenny would wake up in the heart of the night or the thick of the day and gaze out of his open window (which was broken somehow) to the stars or to the clouds and feel an impulsive ache in all of his cells. He tried to stay inside and out of sight at night, but he was way too impulsive for his own good. He was overwhelmingly, but uniquely rambunctious.

So Kenny slips out and visits the eighth grade girls that skip school and smoke near the church. They didn’t particularly care for younger middle school kids that wanted to hang out in their little crew, but they had invited Kenny personally. They thought he was cute in some way. He listened mostly, and they always had so much to say.

They told the blonde to invite Craig so he could partake in the eighth grade shenanigans, but Kenny doubted he’d want to be around all the femininity. He was kind of the only guy, apart from a few intoxicated high schoolers who’d slink close by. It was real creepy shit, but it seemed like the girls were fine with them; they never said anything about them.

“Why do you want Craig anyway?”

“He seems chill. Like you.”

Another girl adorned with purple streaks in her black hair interrupted, “He doesn’t talk.”

The blonde was confused. He didn’t really understand what that meant, and he wouldn’t for a while, at least. Girls were weird like that, and he just let them be. There were times he’d see Eliza in the distance- wherever he was- and she’d wave, her right hand’s fingers fluttering. The left hand was preoccupied with her hair, tucking it behind her ear. Kenny would wave back reluctantly, but only a little.

There were other times when Kenny would wait for school to end and hang out with Stan and such. They didn’t ask where he had been, which was normal. They were used to all his abnormalities; they didn’t need to know. They played new video games on new consoles, or talk shit until Stan’s mom begrudgingly forced them all to go home. Sometimes, they’d get into traditional Stan and such shenanigans, first-rate South Park disasters. It was irksome, but nostalgic. When was the last time Kenny got his head cut off because of some supreme bullshit?

Kenny didn’t see Craig during his time off, but it wasn’t anything close to intentional. They just kept missing each other, honestly. He’d go over to his house, ring the doorbell, and Craig’s mother- who was tall, skinny, and tremendously, surprisingly blonde- informed him that he wasn’t around, that he was dawdling around town with Clyde and company (which was fine, of course). She had tight red lips, an even tighter expression; she sort of looked like a venomous bitch, just like Craig said.

And there were times when Craig would try to come over, despite Kenny’s resolute attempts to keep him away- which was very Craig-like. Kenny’s mother would say things such as, “That little blue shit knocked on the door wanting to see _you_.” Or (when she wasn’t drunk), “Your friend Craig came by to see you Ken.”

It was like that, his mother’s sweet sober voice, her dreaded drunken voice over and over in the same way until there was a knock on the door (whilst he was gazing at a 1984 Playboy magazine that used to belong to his dad) and Kenny was at home to answer it himself.

His ocean eyes were greeted with the yellow puff ball first. When it shifted, his gaze moved along to Craig’s ashen, horribly _dead_ eyes- but only for a moment. He needed to look his lips, the words, the frown, or the smile they’d form after he’d say, “I missed you.”

But Craig spoke before Kenny could, “You don’t have to let me come in.”

But Kenny moved to the side nonetheless. Craig hesitated a bit, but his foot was already in the doorway. He came in (tracking dead leaves over the carpet, ones that Kenny would pick out of the shagginess with meticulous effort) and ignored his hung over parents passed out on the sofa and on the counter. He found Kenny’s room himself, his eyes wandering the walls as he walked in. Kenny figured he’d say something about all the cars, and the models hanging on his cracked walls, but he didn’t.

Craig only took a seat on his mattress, on the messy covers; Kenny joined him. His fingers twiddled with his sheets similar to the way they twiddled with autumn leaves.

“I got the cigarettes and shit.” Craig pulled two packs of cigarettes out of his blue pockets. He deadpanned, “The movies are at home.”

Kenny nodded, “You met Kevin.”

Craig slowly fell back against the entirety of his bed, “He showed up right after you left, wherever you went.” He outstretched his legs and yawned, “You can come over and we’ll watch the movies.” He closed his eyes. There was a still a brown, decaying leaf stuck to the fabric of Craig’s blue sneakers. Kenny pulled it off.

“Okay.”

“It’s already October.”

“Yeah.”

“Halloween is coming up.”

“Mhm.”

It started to snow. An insignificant flake floated through the window and graces the skin above Craig’s lashes. Kenny took the opportunity to kiss it away. He leaned over him and pressed his lips against Craig’s eyelids; he could feel the snowflake melt and cool his skin. Craig’s eyelashes fluttered against his cheek. Kenny pulled away and the kiss faded into a soft parting sound. The blonde asked casually, as if he never kissed Craig at all-

“You have any plans?”

Craig eyes were open; he stared for a brief and fleeting moment. Something similar to a smile visibly tugged at the cynical boy’s lips. Kenny could see the bright blue of his braces, the bright blue of the flecks in his eyes. Craig shifted, comfortably; the mattress creaked.

“No. Do you want to do something?”

…

_Uh…This has been edited as of Nov. 21 2k16._

_I'm sorry for not responding to everyone's comments in a timely fashion. I'm just still really shocked that you all feel this way about this story, I didn't really know what to say. But thank you all so much! I appreciate the Kudos and the comments; feedback really keeps me going!_


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